Joker: White Lies.
Joaquin Phoenix turns in a fine performance in a well-made film with an ugly, irresponsible message.
Joker is the kind of film that can easily put one at a loss for a place to even start talking about it. Do we first discuss its at-times strikingly artful composition? The undeniably affecting performance, or the (mostly) genuinely engaging story over which these trimmings are draped? Or do we ignore those aspects of the film in favor of talking mostly about what an ugly, irresponsible, and gutlessly petulant message it has, all that art and color and weight loss and subtext funneled into the service of something truly vile and repugnant?
It’s a strange feeling, to be so aggressively confronted by the vast distance between the quality of the ideas present in this film, and that of the competency with which they’re realized on screen. Even if it is a little bit My First Prestige movie from time to time (or a lot of the time). Joker is unafraid to be, among other things, shockingly on the nose, eventually reaching a moment in its climax where its main character almost seems frustrated that the audience isn’t quite grasping the film’s message in the way that he wants, so he throws away any and all subtextual artifice to simply scream its thesis statement at us, in a way that my description here does not really exaggerate whatsoever.
Lazily hiding itself under a cloak of half-baked social commentary about class disparity amid the crumbling infrastructure of a dying city, Joker is really just a story built to justify one man’s violent outburst, once he realizes the world won’t be giving him the thing he’s decided he deserves to be given. Perhaps even more glaringly audacious is the readiness with which that brand of impotent, unearned rage is mapped onto the wider social tensions experienced during moments like the Occupy Wall Street movement, or others more directly related to police violence.
In what amounts to George Costanza: The Movie, only he murders a few people by the end, Joker is a pile-on of the laziest sort, in which the hapless Arthur Fleck just can’t seem to catch a break, despite being a totally good and normal dude, we guess? We’re not sure. The movie never bothers to tell us if or why Arthur deserves any of the things he wants; it’s apparently just enough for us to know the depths his rage can (and will) reach when he is ultimately unable to get them. If you can think of it happening to a Hapless Schlub Character, it happens in this movie. He loses his shitty job. His living situation is bleak. The girl doesn’t like him. He’s bad at standup. Eventually, all these different pitches combine into a frequency that Arthur can no longer stand, and he’s pushed to the point of lashing out by way of murdering three Wall Street types on a subway. This is apparently enough to trigger an Anonymous/Occupy Wall Street hybrid social movement that allows Arthur to then serve as a sort of clumsy synecdoche for a larger, more justified type of cultural rage that the film never comes close to earning, instead focusing on Arthur’s failure to get the stuff he wants in life, despite having not really earned it or anything.
If I’m sounding repetitive, that might be for a reason. Cyclical by design, this movie is a repeating exercise in frustration and denial, Arthur slowly making his way down a spiral of despondency and repression until finally snapping…and not in a way that isn’t engaging, if I’m being completely honest. For all its empty messaging and vapid edgelord bullshit, Joker is a still a well-constructed and exceedingly well-shot film.
And then there’s Joaquin.
It’s hard to approach a performance like this one as part of a general audience, free of any preconceptions that might be grafted onto it from literal months of hearing what a transformative masterwork it is. And it is certainly transformative. Joaquin is Acting here, and he’s doing a lot of it: He disappears deep into Fleck, all sinew and bones and spavined angles that I’m still not certain weren’t prosthetics in places, yet retaining an almost otherworldly fluidity of motion. His body control and ability to commit to character are undeniable here, but it’s hard to tell where the fault lies when it ultimately fails to become something more than the simple sum of its parts. Editing could possibly be at issue here, but something about Phoenix’s performance as Fleck never seems to grow or evolve in a meaningful way, instead just playing the same note—quiet, seething rage under an awkwardly needy Little Lord Fauntleroy exterior—to the hilt, pushing it until its breaking point, at which it very suddenly shifts gears into something else. Fleck’s arc is easily tracked within the script, but his performance seems to have substituted moments in which he might grow into a new version of himself with…dancing. Lots and lots of dancing. So much dancing that it becomes hard to say whether Phoenix’s performance ever actually evolves along with his character, instead feeling stuck on the same track in a way that contradicts its reception so far.
It doesn’t help that his performance is so isolated within the film, either. Nobody else gets enough to do here, and long stretches of screen time devoted to letting Phoenix just Act are compelling, but threaten Joker’s momentum in places. Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen all do fine work with their nine lines apiece, but it’s positively criminal to use this little of Shea Wigham in any film.
Still, when they do show up, the supporting players all look fantastic, as there’s no denying that Todd Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher shot a hell of a film. Their vision of Gotham is handsomely photographed, and Phillips’ camera frequently finds what truly feels like the most compelling (if, at times, also the most obvious) choice when it comes to the framing and composition of his action. Fleck’s world is all wet and mildew, and a sort of gun-metal monochromatic color palate reveals itself as a surprisingly canny counterpoint when set against Joker’s brief flashes of shocking, vibrant color. It’s an unexpected treat, how good this film looks, right down to the subtlety of the design choices in the Joker makeup Fleck ultimately winds up donning.
It’s almost enough to make you forget that there’s no real reason for him to be donning it in the first place, as this character’s trajectory is tied to anything having to do with the DC mythology in a way that’s tenuous at best. Anything explicitly making this character “The Joker” could have been cut from the film with zero consequence; the literal only thing that Fleck ever does that categorizes him in this way is exist in the same city and time period as a little boy we’re told is Bruce Wayne.
It’s a telling detail, that this film has to stretch its premise so far to even justify its existence within the larger pantheon of cultural storytelling into which it has so inelegantly forced itself, and it speaks to this emperor’s distinct lack of clothes. This isn’t a prestige picture; this is a strident screed about how It’s Everyone Else’s Fault. This isn’t a Joker origin story; it’s a movie about a guy who kills a few people and then also there’s clown makeup. There are no big ideas to be had here; this is a feature-length temper tantrum.
