A Clown Is Born
'Joker: Folie á Deux' sacrifices all to the Gods of continuity in a padded, glorified music video.
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On the surface, it seems strange that the “here for the gangbang” guy from Old School would be directing the grittiest installments of DC’s gritty, evil clown-based Batman spinoff, Joker and the new Joker: Folie á Deux. But if you’ve followed Todd Phillips’ career from the beginning, his ouvre has actually been remarkably consistent. From his earliest documentaries, about psychotically aggro frat guys (Frat House) and psychotically committed punk rockers (Hated: GG Allin & the Murder Junkies) through his series of mostly light bro comedies (Road Trip, Old School, The Hangover) and into his latest incarnation as Scorsese light (War Dogs, Joker), Phillips has been exploring white male misbehavior and general scumbaggery the entire time, albeit from slightly different angles.
Oftentimes people accuse him of glorifying or inciting the behavior he depicts, to the point that national outlets were running stories about Joker possibly sparking “copycat shootings” because of its “sympathetic” depiction of a “violent, mentally ill loner.”
Unfortunately for all of us, Todd Phillips did not invent the violent, angry incel. If anything, it seemed more like he was taking a more critical, satirical eye to a character whose appeal was always a little perverse and sociopathic, and that we only failed to notice before because he was usually sanitized in PG-13 action tropes. In retrospect, maybe we should’ve taken note when Diddy enjoyed dressing up as the Joker so much. Specifically the Heath Ledger, Dark Knight Joker. Diddy notably didn’t dress like the Joaquin Phoenix Joker, probably because Phillips and Phoenix succeeded in making the character’s ugliness so much more obvious and overt, until it was actually disturbing, and not just a sexy commercial for being disturbing.
Certainly Joker owes a debt to Taxi Driver, both stylistically and thematically, another movie about a violent weirdo whose most repugnant behavior inadvertantly makes him a folk hero to a sick society in a crumbling, 1970s New York. But what filmmaker doesn’t want to make their own Taxi Driver? Todd Phillips sounds more than a little like a Todd Phillips character in Joaquin Phoenix’s story about how he pitched Phoenix on the first film:
Phillips told him Phoenix he needed to think of the film as a heist movie.
“What are you talking about?” Phoenix asked, confused. “There’s barely any action in it.”
Phillips cracked, “We’re gonna take $55 million from Warner Bros. and do whatever the hell we want.”
And what they wanted, apparently, was to make a lightly-Batman-themed homage to Taxi Driver and 70s Scorsese, complete with Travis Bickle in a major role. De Niro’s casting worked, as did Phoenix, and almost the entire cast (Frances Conroy? Shea Wigham? Bill Camp? Marc Maron?), in a movie that was far better than many people gave it credit for. Really its only drawback was the reason WB let them make it in the first place — the fact that it incorporated Batman continuity into it, with Thomas Wayne, young Batman, and a criminal clown killing Bruce’s parents complete with the torn strand of pearls and blah blah blah (Batman’s parents getting killed is now one of the most-depicted events in cinematic history). If I could’ve fast-forwarded through all the Batman stuff in the first movie I would have.
Which brings us to the sequel. The commercial logic of superhero movies clearly necessitates a sequel, but how do you justify narratively a sequel to a Taxi Driver homage that, like its spiritual predecessor, worked so well as a self-contained story? Narratively, I think you don’t. It’s too financially obvious to bother. Todd Phillips reportedly made in the neighborhood of $150 million for The Hangover franchise (famously forgoing his upfront fee in exchange for a chunk of the gross on the original), and the pattern of “leverage success of inspired passion project to milk studio for even more money on mailed-in sequels” seems obvious here. Honestly, can you blame him?
So, Joker: Folie á Deaux. Arthur Fleck is in jail now, awaiting trial for the murder of all those people he killed in the last movie, one of them on live television. There’s been a television movie about him, and he’s still sort of riding high on his pseudo-celebrity. The jail guards (led by the always delightful Brendan Gleeson) have an odd relationship with Arthur, sort of enjoying his antics but still preying on him in any ways they can. They don’t quite like him, or entirely consider him a person, but he makes their lives a little more interesting and affords them certain opportunities.
Meanwhile, Catherine Keener plays Arthur’s shrink, trying to push him towards an insanity defense by claiming that the Joker is a split personality, an entity separate from law-abiding Arthur who commits crimes. And then Arthur meets “Lee Quinzel” (pretty sure you can figure out which Batman character this is) played by Lady Gaga in a coed jail/insane asylum music class (sure) and the two become star-crossed lovers. Lee Quinz is obsessed with the Joker and wants to manipulate the media and turn this folk hero into a movement, possibly at the expense of Arthur himself.
It’s not a bad setup, but a setup is really all it is. Joker: Folie á Deaux is a 133-minute movie that takes place entirely during pre-trial detention. Every time the story threatens to actually go someplace, the plot grinds to a halt for an excruciatingly long stylized musical sequence in which Joker and Harley Quinn sing and dance about wanting to build mountains or some shit. In a good musical, songs advance the plot. Here, they feel like they’re transparently treading water, padding out a plot that’s either only partially formed or too constrained by the broader Batman continuity to really go anywhere.
At one point towards the third act, Arthur tries to put a finger over Lady Gaga’s mouth, pleading “please, no more singing,” at which point almost my entire audience laughed, because we were thinking the exact same thing.