Joker: Folie à Deux
If you’ve been hanging out for the most depressing musical of all time, rejoice, that moment has arrived! Todd Phillips’s Joker of 2019 was a surprising film which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and earned Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for Best Actor. The sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, is no less surprising, but so dark you may need to take a flashlight.
The premise that made the earlier film unique was that it took a character from a superhero comic and created a gritty, psychological drama about social decay, mental illness, and violence. Batman made the most fleeting appearance in the form of a small child. In the new film he never rates a mention. The setting, Gotham City, has always been a surrogate for New York, but it’s a version stripped of its glamour and grandeur. Phillips’s Gotham is a gloomy hellhole of crime and poverty, seething on the brink of mob violence.
Joker is the potential catalyst for this eruption. We meet him in a high security mental institution, the Arkham State Hospital, where he’s awaiting trial for killing five people, including late-night host, Murray Franklin, whom he shot on live TV. He’s not Joker, but Arthur Fleck, the sad loner who wanted to make people laugh but only gave them the creeps. The issue before the court will be whether Arthur is sane enough to be convicted of multiple murders and potentially executed, or whether he suffers from a split personality, with all his crimes being committed by an altar ego.
Arkham House is a grim place, and Arthur has shrunk into himself. Depressed, boney and haggard, he is relentlessly mocked by the prison guards who keep asking him if he has a joke for them. His relationship with the chief guard, Sullivan, (Brendan Gleeson), is mock-friendly, but always a heartbeat away from violence.
When Arthur is allowed to join a musical therapy group in the low security wing, he encounters a woman who gives him her unconditional admiration. This is Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), whom we’ll get to know as Harley Quinn, although not in this film. Suddenly, Arthur’s drab existence is transformed. He’s found the love of his life and feels his old mania surging back. In his mind, he’s the Joker again – sharp, funny, dangerous, idolised by thousands of clones who paint their faces and hold vigils outside the courthouse.
The crux of this story is the developing relationship between these two characters – Arthur, who drifts back and forth between fantasy and reality, and Lee, who worships the aggressive, powerful persona of the Joker, and reinvents herself to match. It’s a claustrophobic affair, conducted through fantasy sequences in which the characters sing fractured renditions of popular songs – For Once in My Life, Close to You, That’s Life, If My Friends Could See Me Now, To Love Somebody, Gonna Build a Mountain, If You Go Away, and more.
Gaga, we know, can sing, even if she continually underplays her vocal talents. Phoenix – who once played Johnny Cash! – gets through his numbers in a thin, warbling voice that does nothing to dispell our ideas about Arthur’s weirdness. Perhaps the weirdest of all pieces is Anthony Newley’s The Joker. It may have been an obvious inclusion, but Arthur Fleck is no Shirley Bassey. Imagine, if you will, Phoenix in full Joker regalia singing: “There’s always a funny man in the game/But he’s only funny by mistake/Everyone laughs at him just the same/They don’t see his lonely heart break…”
The most dynamic of songs becomes the most pathetic.
If there is a keynote number, it’s That’s Entertainment, sung in both solo and in duet form, as a consummately miserable allegory of Arthur’s spiral into psychosis. He is “the clown with his pants falling down.” It’s also an unsubtle message about the United States today, a nation in which a convicted felon can run for President, spout endless lies and hate speech, and be adored by millions of fans. That’s entertainment. As almost all Hollywood movies nowadays seem to be about Donald Trump, it doesn’t take much to see the sickness of Gotham City as holding up a mirror to the greater sickness of contemporary American society. For many people, Trump has the same entertainment value as a Batman villain.
It's hard to envisage this US$200 Million production being a hit with those superhero movie fans who flocked to Deadpool and Wolverine, with its bloodshed and lame wisecracking. Even the titles are a giveaway. Who could expect mainstream US audiences to be attracted to a movie called Folie à Deux? With Deadpool and Wolverine, the Marvel Comics Universe took no chances: the heroes are dependable favourites, the title as complex as ‘The Cat Sat on the Mat’. One suspects Phillips may pay a price at the box office for his artistic aspirations.
A bigger worry is that the film flits awkwardly between genres, being part musical, part prison saga, part courtroom drama. It has a cartoon opening sequence, plenty of sly references to old movies, and a suitably doomy soundtrack by Hildur Gudnadottir, but the story fizzles along with no real tension. If I never felt bored or restless this was largely down to Phoenix and Gaga, who are consistently magnetic, even when playing poor psychos. Arthur’s actions seem to back up the ‘split personality’ defence, as he exudes sadness until Lee reignites his Joker fantasies. Despite his homocidal record, she emerges as stronger and scarier than him. While Lee begins by making up stories about her past to win Arthur’s approval, by the end she seems contemptuous of his hesitancy to go over completely to the dark side.
If the box office allows another sequel, it’s clear that Harley Quinn will be the lead character, and she won’t be burdened with Arthur’s weakness. Where the Joker feels like two separate people, Lee is an embryonic villain who grows into the role. He can’t shake off the past, while she presents a vision of a violent, heartless future. Joker: Folies à Deux is emphatically not a film for the fans. Its true audience is the great American public, and they’re not going to like what they see.
Joker: Folie à Deux
Directed by Todd Phillips
Written by Scott Silver & Todd Phillips
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Leigh Gill, Jacob Lofland, Ken Leung, Bill Smitrovich
USA/Canada, MA 15+, 138 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 12 October, 2024