Flasz On Film

Whatever you may think about the 2019 Joker—and if there’s anything I know for certain, it is that most people do have an opinion on this movie—it was a resounding box office success. It climbed to the top of the ladder while amassing a billion dollars in ticket sales and, for lack of a better description, it became a cultural lightning rod while permanently entering the meme-o-sphere. For better or worse, it grabbed the cultural limelight as it was given an opportunity to spark a conversation about male mental health and the phenomenon of inceldom with its pound shop Taxi Driver get-up.  

Sadly, we ended up squandering this chance as swathes of fans chose instead to adopt the titular character as parts of their personality while others chose to see the movie as confirmation of their already well entrenched beliefs that masculinity is somehow toxic (a claim that is as inscrutable as it is potentially venomous in its own right) and what could have been a classed-up counterweight to the conveyor belt of lookalike Marvel fare pumped out at a steady pace by The House of Mouse, ended up a divisive and predominantly tone deaf experience. But it did make money.  

And in Tinseltown money speaks, so it was a matter of time before someone in the high echelons of the WB food chain would commit multiple hundreds of millions of dollars towards producing a sequel to Todd Phillips’s Joker. And thus, the seed for what eventually became Joker: Folie à Deux was planted. And that’s not even the half of it.  

I remember distinctly how behind-the-scenes information trickled out in dribs and drabs, slowly building a picture of what was to come. That Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips would return. That Lady Gaga would be cast as Harley Quinn. And that the sequel to Joker would be a functional jukebox musical, too. Because… I don’t know. Nobody really knows, exactly. I suppose they had their reasons.  

Therefore, I walked into the movie carrying at least a degree of trepidation because, after all, nobody could really expect anything tangible out of a movie advertised as a self-aware jukebox musical sequel to a film whose slant could have been called everything but self-aware. Joker was an intentionally self-serious, glum and preachy movie trying hard to send a message both to the world at large and to the universe of comic book movie adaptations with its gloomy appeal and a faux-artsy post-Scorsese iconography.  

However, Joker: Folie à Deux greeted me with a familiar aesthetic—right after opening with a Looney Tunes-esque cartoon that in essence betrays the thesis of the movie, but that’s completely beside the point—as it transported me to the infamous Arkham Asylum where the clinically malnourished Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) starts his every day by getting dressed in his convict tighty-whiteys and then carries a pot of his nightly piss in a column of similarly depressed and equally under-dressed inmates, to the accompaniment of “When the Saints Go Marching In” performed by Brendan Gleeson playing a bubbly-yet-predisposed-to-abrupt-violence prison guard. This is where Fleck awaits his trial as the powers that be want him convicted and executed for, as Fleck saw it, giving Robert De Niro’s character “what he fucking deserved.” One day, on his way to see his lawyer (Catherine Keener), Fleck walks through a minimum-security wing of the hospital, where inmates are allowed to indulge in fun activities, like singing and dancing, presumably as a counterpoint to what happens at the hardcore end of the institution where physical activities involve being beaten to a pulp with blunt objects and thrown into holes in the ground for weeks on end, while sadistic guards laugh and laugh and laugh.  

In there he spots a woman and their eyes meet. Oh, it’s clearly love at first sight… or a maniacal delusion. It’s hard to tell these two apart, but the point is that this is where Arthur Fleck, a homicidal maniac with a laundry list of mental issues and a cultural icon embraced by disenfranchised incels worldwide, meets Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga)… who’s also not of sound mind. But you know all that, don’t you. Something sparks between the two… and they break into a song.  

No, rewind.  

Fleck breaks into a song even before, so by the time Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix stage their first awkward duet, and long before they break into their proper song and dance number as they stage an unsuccessful prison break, you should be well appraised of what you’re in for. It is only mere minutes into the movie when we get to experience first-hand what this whole musical experiment is going to be like.  

And it’s not good. Boy is it not good.  

Look, whoever convinced Joaquin Phoenix that he could sing and that it was after all a good idea for him to act in a musical played a cruel trick on him. Though, having looked under the bonnet for exactly forty-seven seconds I can also surmise that—and it both beggars belief and somehow plays in tune with how the movie comes across as a piece of cinematic self-indulgence—the filmmaker himself not only did not mind but openly encouraged his actors to sing purposefully out of tune. Now, I don’t know much about music, but I know enough to tell the difference between an accomplished artist and a professional singer purposefully singing off key and a guy who just lets sounds fall out of his mouth and tumble onto the floor like unwashed potatoes out of a defective sack. Something tells me that either Phillips was in denial about his idea that listening to Phoenix butcher classic musical numbers was a display of raw emotion, or that he didn’t have it in him to tell Phoenix his singing wasn’t good enough to be heard outside of the confines of the bathroom when he was having a shower and he adopted the “I wanted the actors to sound terrible” philosophy post hoc.  

It was honestly embarrassing to sit through. I watched all those song-and-dance numbers with my head in my hands, incapable of comprehending that it was allowed to come out this way. I get the idea of “rawness” but this ain’t it, chief. In fact, I felt doubly embarrassed for Lady Gaga, who I imagined must have gone through hell sitting in the booth with headphones on while recording the vocals in post-production and having to listen to Phoenix butcher his melodies with such brazen incompetence that it made me think fondly of Ryan Gosling’s vocal talents in the otherwise magical La La Land.  

So, that’s a big problem with Joker: Folie à Deux; however, there’s more. Though my next grievance with this film is directly related to its cosmically cacophonous catastrophe because, without a shadow of a doubt, the movie is just too damn long. And I wouldn’t have been able to lodge this complaint had it not been for those musical numbers, the excision of which would have likely bought me forty-five minutes of my life back. At which point I would probably be able to stomach just how audaciously self-aggrandizing this movie is. And I don’t really mind pompous movies all that much. But make them short. Please and thank you.

Though, this isn’t an open invitation for you to recommend terribly self-indulgent movies to me, most of which are under eighty minutes, no sir. I have seen enough late Godard movies like Goodbye to Language or The Image Book (even typing these titles provokes a gag reflex and leaves me temporarily with a terribly acrid taste in the back of my throat, yikes) to know that some seemingly tight movies can be utterly unbearable.  

However, I want to live in a world where the sequel to Joker, which was already mediocre at best, at least functioned as a comparably mediocre attempt at a love story in an asylum. I would have stomached the idea of reviewing it as a blowhard attempt at One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Lilith, which at least would have been symmetrical to Joker functioning as a film-bro attempt at Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. It would have been fine because the bokeh-rich aesthetic alone would have been enough to convince the film-bros in attendance that the movie, like its predecessor, retains a modicum of artistic credibility.

Sadly, this isn’t the world we live in and Joker: Folie à Deux is… I don’t honestly know, what it is. An attempt at cultural back-pedalling and flushing the predecessor’s caché down the drain maybe? Or is it just a totally unfocused attempt at looking all edgy and cool while implying openly that Fleck’s mental illness is just his personality while simultaneously undermining this thesis on multiple occasions and working towards a slap on the face of an ending which adds exactly bupkis to the movie’s own conversation with itself, the audience accrued by the previous movie and those who decided to lend Todd Phillips and his co-conspirators their precious time? You tell me because having sat through this film and marveled at its sanctimonious attempts at navel-gazing and faux satire I derived diddly squat.  

I’m sorry to report that Joker: Folie à Deux is unnerving, embarrassingly pompous and completely void of any self-reflection. It’s a bad movie that knows it’s bad but pretends in front of the world that it has turned out exactly as intended. Because nobody has the guts to admit they spent two hundred million dollars on a dud that not only isn’t going to stand the test of time as a gonzo comic book movie or a cult classic in the making, but a brash attempt at torching whatever cultural conversation the predecessor was trying to have… and with its absolutely stupendously tone-deaf ending it might retroactively torch the legacy of the Christopher Nolan-directed masterclass, The Dark Knight. And no amount of Steve Coogan interviewing Phoenix or Phoenix himself pretending to be Atticus Finch in clown make-up is going to convince me to like this utter pile of steaming doodoo. Consequently, it took immense discipline on my part not to have joaqued out of the cinema and bailed on the movie the way Phoenix infamously joaqued out of a production of the new Todd Haynes movie mere days before the shooting was supposed to commence. 

It just boggles the mind that in 2024 a massive studio can greenlight a movie this bad, spend two hundred million dollars on its production, believe it would be a good idea to turn it into a musical and trust in the radical notion that somehow hearing Joaquin Phoenix sing is going to get people to show up in droves demanding to see this movie on repeat. But alas, here we are.