Joker – Review

Joker

Directed by: Todd Phillips

Runtime: 122 minutes

There have been a myriad of films that have depicted the inner psyche of the downtrodden, disturbed individuals that eventually culminate in violent outbursts. These films are usually relegated to smaller cinema screens, awaiting a rental from a fifteen-year-old future film student who, for a brief moment, believes Fight Club may be the greatest thing to happen to cinema. Unfortunately, any film like this always runs the risk of fear-mongering and pre-panic of what the ‘youth’ will take from it; if they see a crazy, violent man on-screen and are forced to sympathise with him, then they may be spurred on to take inspiration from the screen and commit similar atrocities.

This is an age-old argument, with even Plato being concerned with the status and place of imitative arts. I want to make it clear that, when reviewing this film, I am not taking a stance on its justification, or lack thereof, of its violent content, or of what violence it could insight from the masses—really, it’s not something that I believe anyone can predict (I mean, who would have thought that Pepe the Frog would become a racist hate symbol? Or that My Little Pony would mobilise a bunch of grown men to swarm conventions meant for little girls?). Instead, I wish to review the film less for its socio-textual value, and more for the product that was presented to me on screen. Strangely enough, despite the film receiving an incredible amount of hype (with the chatter of Oscar buzz mixing with the panic-inducing terrorist threats), I found it to be painfully average, lacking any real depth, and, speaking as a Batman fan, a missed opportunity.

The film follows Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a hard-on-his-luck clown who lives in New York  Gotham City. Struggling to become a stand-up comedian, and living in a desolate apartment with his less-than-supportive mother, we see our ‘protagonist’ get increasingly more broken down by the world before he emerges as the crazed villain we all know and love to hate. “Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?” Fleck asks his less-than-enthused social worker, lamenting the decline of manners and empathy found among the masses. The film is unrelenting in its bleakness; the camera forces us to stay with Fleck through its entire runtime with claustrophobic extreme close-ups, sickly fantasy sequences, and long, drawn-out scenes of the main character’s compulsive laughter. This isn’t a film you can necessarily ‘enjoy’ in any way, and it doesn’t try to be, but sometimes the consistently dour tone is, at best, taxing and, at worst, tiresome.

There are some positives in the film. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is as high-quality as ever, and he does elevate the film to becoming entirely watchable. The final act of the film does incorporate some interesting ideas and set-pieces, and when we see Phoenix as our fully-fledged Joker, he does bring a manic charisma that could most definitely work in a Batman outing. Unfortunately, this shines a light on one of the biggest problems the film has—origin stories are not always necessary, and in the case of such an enigmatic character as the Joker, can even be damaging to their whole characterisation. To be honest, if I had balls, by the end of the film, they would be well and truly blue—just as we get to see something I wanted to see… the film ends.

This is where Joker cements itself as a missed opportunity for me. Echoes of a much better interpretation of the character begin to shine through in the later portions of the film, and it just made me wish that they didn’t try to hide the fact that this is a ‘comic book movie’ underneath all the Scorsese rip-offs and edgelord content. We are now in an age where the comic book movie doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a drop in value or quality, and it would have been interesting to see a Joker film that did take a less shiny-blockbuster approach to the content, but still remained true to the source material. In fact, this is by no means the first time Batman villains have had interesting departures from the comic book norm—Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum comes to mind as stories that successfully tackle the psychological aspects of Batman’s rogues’ gallery, without trying to hide the comic-book origins of the characters.

I can’t really celebrate this film for evolving comic-book cinema when it seemed to be ashamed of its heritage. We are not given a genre-bending Joker film that taps into the fascinating anarchistic chaos and oddly enticing charisma of the character, we are instead given a sub-par remake of Taxi Driver with the DC logo attached to it. The main message of the film seems to be ‘poor people need more help and rich people suck’, with some brief, and confusing, musings on mental health—not to mention the groan-worthy inclusion of the ‘toxic mother’ trope that seems to be a cornerstone for any psychopath’s profile since Norman Bates. The only time the film does try to link itself with its comic book origin is in its heavy-fisted treatment of Fleck’s relationship with Thomas and Bruce Wayne, attempting to give their eventual rivalry some context that, to be honest, does nothing but cheapen the iconic relationship between hero and villain.

Joker is a film that seems to think it holds more depth than it actually does, and suffers from the tired Hollywood origin-story obsession. Unfortunately, the bleak nature of the film and its basic level of competence meant that I could not even enjoy this on an ironic level (as I did with the absolutely awful, but beautifully bad Robin Hood origin movie). Is it unwatchable? Definitely not—Phillips’ direction is quite well-manicured and Phoenix’s performance is decidedly magnetic. However, would I watch it again? Probably not. While I have been accused of being anti-DC after my lukewarm Aquaman review, I definitely am not; in fact, it is my love of the wider Batman canon that makes me feel like Joker may have had promise at some stages in its runtime, but didn’t quite land its intended punchline.