I can’t really argue with people who hate this movie. I see what they see.
But in the third act of the movie, I felt like I suddenly saw the light, down a narrow tunnel, of what Todd Phillips and Scott Silver were trying to do. It started to make some real sense to me… which is to say that most of the first two acts of avoiding getting to it were that much more infuriating.
The first thing that, having seen the film, slapped me in the face as hard as Joker himself might, is that it is NOT a 2-hander. Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel is not the co-star of the movie. It is easy to imagine this character matching up with Arthur Fleck and delivering a really fun, dark movie. But that is not what they made. It feels a lot more like a movie in which Lee Quinzel was one of the many significant but secondary supporting characters whose position in the film expanded when they decided to hire a star for the role instead of - with enormous respect - someone at the level of Catherine Keener or Brendan Gleeson… who are great, great actors, but are not stars that will drive box office or a heavy media focus.
So screw the pretentious-as-fuck “Folie à Deux” sequeling title. It literally means, “mental illness shared by two people in close association.” But that is not what happens in the movie. I am not going to dig in and spoil things, but it promises a 2-hander that it never delivers. Natural Born Killers is a folie à deux movie. Bonnie and Clyde is kind of a folie à deux movie, though not as much as one expects. Venom is a variation on a folie à deux movie, with one character occupying the other. but becoming a mutuality.
In Joker: Folie à Deux, the Lee character wakes something in Arthur that’s been, it seems, sleeping since he was arrested and jailed. This is not an unimportant thing. But he gets the entire first act to kind of mope around and let us linger in his life as a castrated psychopath. Lee is drawn to Arthur for reasons of her own and based on her perception of him.
This circumstance is familiar to fans of Fight Club, which like Venom, hinges on a character with two shared faces. While Marla is drawn to “Tyler Durden,” she is not the co-lead of the movie, really. It is The Tylers’ movie. Fight Club hinges on the eventual exposure of its truth and Marla becomes a part of what forces that truth to come to the surface for all. Joker 2 takes a similar initial tack with Lee… but the ultimate dispotion of that journey is quite different.
The music in Joker 2 has moments of delight. The progression, in Arthur’s mind, of the Lee character being a shower-level singer and becoming, number-by-number more and more Gaga, is interesting. I quite liked Joaquin’s singing being all over the place and then getting surprises like the tap dance sequence.
During the movie, this all seems kind of random, which brings me to my second slap in the face…
Joker 2 is absolutely not a musical in any remotely conventional way. It leans into Pennies From Heaven more than any other musical, even though it makes a lot of musical references, starting with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is so not relevant to anything in this movie that it kind of pissed me off in retrospect. In time, it becomes clear that the Pennies From Heaven structure of old songs reflecting unspoken feelings is also not what Phillips is doing here.
I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that the musical numbers are, simply, Arthur’s brain falling in love with Lee. What is missing? Lee’s perspective. In these numbers, we feel her falling in love too… but we aren’t getting her perspective… we are seeing what Arthur hopes she is feeling and becoming.
I am okay with a movie that is all from Arthur’s perspective. But the audience is misled by the presence of Gaga in all this. I actually like where Phillips and Silver go with her in the third act. It fits the film and the first film. It fits the character as she is actually presented - albeit underwritten- in the film, outside of the fantasy. But it causes whiplash, because in so many ways, Gaga cause the audience to expect other things.
And because the star is so much more dominant than her character, there feels like there is a giant hole in her almost completely untold story.
I also had the distinct feeling that as the movie leaning more toward Gaga’s unique set of skills, it leaned away from characters like Keener’s Maryanne Stewart and Gleeson’s Jackie Sullivan, who I can easily imagine being richer and deeper and more important to the overall themes of the film.
Likewise, this movie, which is an absolute sequel, is mostly bereft of the outside world… which is where we left Arthur in the first film. The phenomenon of Joker in the first film is left mostly as background in this film… but it is not gone and it is critical to this film’s story. It is at the core of what is right and wrong about Arthur and Lee’s relationship.
There are times when Joker 2 really seems to be reducing itself to a movie about a guy who killed 6 people. And I guess that movie could be great too. But then the movie switches back to the major impact of the cultural phenomenon of Joker within Joker (the first film) and it becomes super important. And it feels like we are being disrespected by the film.
The 3rd act - primarily the 2nd half of the 3rd act - felt like it clarified what this particular exercise was meant to be. Joker On Trial… both by the state and by himself. First act, he is living in an emotional coma, shut down and disconnected from what he has done. Second act, he falls in love and comes to life and convinces himself that he can live again and be Joker in spirit again. Third act, not going to spoil… but he looks at what he has become more closely and consequences ensue.
But they overlit the Christmas tree.
I’m very curious to see the movie again after having thought about it a bit. As I wrote at the top, I get what really, really didn’t work about the movie for so many smart critics and others. I wasn’t as angry as some during or after the screening. But I was utterly frustrated. And I remain fairly frustrated.
When a movie from a skilled filmmaker - which Todd Phillips is - misses in the ways this film does, my ears perk up and I start trying to figure out why. The film doesn’t do what audiences want it to do. Yes. But it can’t be that simple. It may not make it easy, but there has to be a reason he went to work every day. And it wasn’t to cash a check. So I think about what led to the choices. I’m sure that Todd, who loves to argue, would tell me I was wrong about some of this… and I may well be. Lots of pieces in the Lego that is a movie.
I really think Lady Gaga is terrific in this movie. She takes the assignment and gives it everything, whether in quiet close-ups or in musical sequences. But she mis-scales the film. Look at that one-sheet… it’s not this movie. At all.
Until tomorrow…
Interesting. I've been waffling on whether to see this or something else. The visceral hatred on X turned me to con, but after reading your take I'm undecided (again).