Joker: Folie à Deux
The comic-strip franchise takes on an even darker hue and a leftfield stance to provide Joaquin Phoenix with the opportunity for a lot more acting.
La misère de jour: Joaquin Phoenix
Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
As 2024 musicals go, this is probably the most deserving of the title Wicked, except that title has already been taken. Still, it is remarkable that a big-budget Hollywood movie, and a sequel at that, would dare to give itself a foreign monicker. In fact, ‘daring’ is the strongest asset of this massive anomaly, a platform for Joaquin Phoenix to do a lot more acting and for the opportunity of even more violence. Joker: Folie à Deux is essentially a courtroom drama, a prison drama, and a jukebox musical, and is as depressing as hell. Partly a critique of the celebrity show trial – à la O.J. Simpson, Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow and Donald Trump – its defendant, Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), is less interesting to a real audience because he’s just a figment of the scriptwriters’ imagination.
As for the musical numbers, a hotchpotch of pop songs and show tunes, they serve merely as a curiosity as they fail to build on or further the action. In fact, there really is no narrative to speak of, unless one counts the meeting of minds and lips of Fleck and Harleen Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn) who meet at a music class at Gotham’s Arkham State Hospital. She (Lady Gaga) is attracted more to the Joker than the pathetic, bug-like creature who invented him and so channels his psychosis to boost her own. The subtitle – folie à deux – is actually a psychiatric term used to describe the infrequent occurrence of two people sharing the same psychotic syndrome, sharing one or even more paranoid delusions.
With a budget of $190-$200 million, the film’s production values are ace, yet the underlit interiors, stormy weather outside the prison walls (there is a lot of rain) and insistent cello chords on the soundtrack merely conspire to generate an opera of misery. There was a time when audiences flocked to the picture palaces to forget their troubles, to have a laugh and to put a spring in their step. However, today’s cinema releases seem hellbent on creating a stage of doom and gloom, where apparently the darker the emotional complexion the more worthy the offering. And yet we’ve got the 24/7 deluge of global news coverage for that.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Leigh Gill, Ken Leung, Jacob Lofland, Bill Smitrovich, Sharon Washington.
Dir Todd Phillips, Pro Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Joseph Garner, Screenplay Scott Silver and Todd Phillips, Ph Lawrence Sher, Pro Des Mark Friedberg, Ed Jeff Groth, Music Hildur Guðnadóttir, Costumes Arianne Phillips, Sound Malte Bieler, Erik Aadahl and Dan Gamache.
Domain Entertainment/DC Studios/Joint Effort-Warner Bros.
138 mins. USA/Canada. 2024. UK and US Rel: 4 October 2024. Cert. 15.
