Post by Dracula on Oct 4, 2024 22:41:35 GMT -5
Joker: Folie à Deux(10/3/2024)
So, I don’t think this movie really works. The musical numbers don’t work, the message is obvious, and the story is dour, and yet… I can’t entirely dismiss this thing. It’s kind of the inverse of the first movie in that it has a point it wants to make but does so in kind of a messy and unappealing way whereas the first movie was strongly executed movie with a shallow and derivative message. It’s not particularly derivative like the first movie is and certainly isn’t following the increasingly familiar superhero movie formula that everyone is sick of and that’s certainly nice. There are also some scenes to be found here which, in isolation, are quite strong and there are certain images that do stand out and I think the acting is still mostly strong across the board. Part of me wants to defend the movie and suspect that its willingness to tear into the legacy of its predecessor will make the movie stand out over the years and people may well come to appreciate it just as an example of an unusual approach to making a Hollywood sequel… but then I remember that the experience of actually watching the thing is as underwhelming as it is and that’s a bit too big of a problem to overcome with mere moxie.
**1/2 out of Five
Having a favorable opinion about a movie that makes a billion dollars at the box office and gets nominated for eleven Oscars usually isn’t an experience I’d call lonely, but I did feel kind of alone in having given four out of five stars to Todd Phillips 2019 film Joker. That’s because, although sites like Rotten Tomatoes will tell you the film is broadly liked by critics most of the really prominent voices came out pretty hard against it. Film Twitter in particular hated it and it seemed to cause some really wild discourse leading it up to its release with people acting like it was some sort of dangerous incel propaganda or something. I thought that was pretty ridiculous but there were limits to how much I was going to defend it. It was plainly derivative of a pair of Scorsese movies and I didn’t think the movie was a particularly sophisticated take on mental illness or populism, but then again this is also a comic book movie we’re talking about, I was never expecting it to be all that deep. In general my take on the movie was “don’t take it too seriously and you’ll be left with a neat little take on Batman lore with some cool sets and a fun central performance.” I wouldn’t have given it all those Oscar nomination but as this genre goes it was a fun experiment and the type of thing I’m down to support. I didn’t necessarily think we needed sequel though, but the more I heard about it the more curious I got. Doing stuff like giving it a wacky French title and reportedly making it a musical seemed pretty wild, the type of things you do when you’re willing to do something challenging and unexpected. Then the negative reviews came out… but I wasn’t sure how much to trust those given the hoopla around the first movie so I went into this sequel not knowing what to expect and what I got was… certainly something…
Joker: Folie à Deux is set in what is more or less the immediate aftermath of the first Joker. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been arrested and is in jail awaiting trial, where he’s overseen by a trio of rather violent guards led by Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson). While in prison Fleck seems to have calmed down a bit and has been taking medication, he’s not “sane” exactly but he isn’t really behaving like the deranged killer we saw towards the end of the first movie. Things start to change a bit when he’s escorted to a choir practice at the psychiatric hospital that’s part of the larger prison complex where he sees a female inmate named Harleen "Lee" Quinzel (Lady Gaga) who seems to be a fan of his “work” as the Joker. Smitten, her influence starts to bring that Joker personality back to the surface for Fleck and he starts fantasizing about bursting into song, sometimes with Lee by his side. But with a trial looming, in which he could be sentenced to death if his lawyer (Catherine Keener) can’t convince a jury that he was mentally ill at the time of his crimes, which would require him to bring Fleck to the surface as much as possible rather than Joker, but his increasing co-dependency with Lee is going to make that difficult.
As you can probably tell from the plot description this differs pretty radically from the Harley Quinn origin and characterization that we’ve traditionally gotten from DC lore in much the way the first film differs from the usual characterization of The Joker. Here Quinn is not a psychologist who comes to sympathize and fall in love with The Joker but is instead a fellow mental patient who is essentially a fangirl of Fleck from the start but is almost certainly the smarter and more canny of the two: the manipulator rather than the manipulated. But she’s also not really the focus, despite the title this is still primarily Flecks movie and plays out from his perspective pretty much entirely including in fantasy musical sequences that exist in his head. That’s because in a lot of ways this is a movie that, instead of letting the Joker who was built up in the last movie loose to be the supervillain that he was set up to be, this one seem more interested in looking back and questioning just what was presented in the first movie both through the ensuing trial scenes and through Fleck’s own self realizations. This is going to be a bit of a “zig” when the audience is expecting the movie to “zag” and its general boldness in kind of undoing what the first movie did is probably going to earn the movie something of a cult of defenders. In a lot of ways it seems like a movie directed at the “bad” fans of the first movie that the media was so scared of and is a movie that wants to illustrate to those who missed it the first time around that while one can sympathize to some extent with the fact that this guy is disturbed and was dealt a bad hand in life, there’s nothing cool about the decent into violence he took and that he should not be valorized just because he confusedly performs some anti-establishment gestures along the way.
That’s all kind of bold, but personally, I didn’t really need it. I think all of that was already there in the first movie to be found by anyone paying attention and that having it all quite literally re-litigated at length in front of a jury was in some wildly unrealistic courtroom scenes was not exactly necessary. In a lot of ways it’s probably the confused fans of Arthur Fleck that really needed more examination: what do they see in this guy and why? In theory Harley Quinn should have been the catalyst for that perspective but the movie always keeps her at a distance along with the rest of Fleck’s fans, largely just making them an ominous unruly rabble outside of a courthouse cheering on a killer for some reason. There are some legitimate points to be found there about the way the media builds up true crime figures (there’s a lot of Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme to be found in Quinn), which really should have been the film’s central theme but it generally feels secondary and mostly goes underexplored.
Really though a lot of my biggest problems with the movie have less to do with the broad themes than they do with the execution and in particular I think the idea of making this a musical was kind of a disaster. When that was first proposed I thought it sounded like a cool idea and I can maybe see a version of this where it works better but the problem is that these musical numbers just kind of don’t work. The film is a jukebox musical featuring quite a few full length musical numbers with Phoenix and Gaga singing what are mostly classic Tin Pan Alley show tunes by the likes of Burt Bacharach and George Gershwin but with some later pop hits like The Carpenter’s “Close to You” and the Bee Gee’s “To Love Somebody” thrown in. These are put into the movie Chicago style, with all of the moments where the characters break out into song supposedly being fantasy sequences in the heads of the characters to represent their decent into madness, with some of them going all the way into these variety show looking abstract sets. In fact if you were going to pin the movie’s formula down to a single movie like you everyone did with the first movie it would probably be Chicago with just a pinch of Dancer in the Dark. The problem is that generally speaking musical numbers in movie are supposed to be, you know, entertaining in and of themselves and these just aren’t.
Joaquin Phoenix was a good enough singer when he was playing Johnny Cash but he just doesn’t have a voice that feels Broadway ready and I did not have any particular desire to hear his takes on these songs that had been done better elsewhere. And while Gaga does have the voice for this I don’t think her numbers really make those songs fresh either because, well, this movie is kind of too much of a bummer to make seeing Gaga belt out “That’s Entertainment” entertaining. That’s not to say musicals can never be melancholy, they can, but it’s a hard balance to pull off and this movie doesn’t do it. In theory these numbers are supposed to express what’s going through the heads of these characters and they mostly don’t, or if they do they take longer to do so then they need to and kind of just end up padding out the movie’s runtime and I grew pretty tired of them after a while. Maybe this approach might have made more sense in a different kind of Joker movie with a more gregarious take on the character or one where the Joker and Harley relationship is played more straight, but they don’t make much sense in the midst of the rather deeply cynical and deglamorizing story we’re otherwise being given.
**1/2 out of Five
