The ‘Joker’ Is On You

What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that treats him like trash? An Oscar-winning bleakfest called Joker that grosses a billion dollars worldwide. And what do you get when you make a follow-up that’s a romance, a musical, a prison movie and a courtroom drama all rolled into one without really being any of those things? Joker Folie à Deux, a turgid, vibe-heavy semi-subversion of cinematic genre trappings that fails precisely because it never really commits to reimagining what it purports to reject.

JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX  ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Todd Phillips
Written by: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz
Running time: 1e8 mins

In a way, the half-heartedness fits its main character well, since Todd Phillip’s admirably outré version of Batman’s nemesis Joker, aka Arthur Fleck (a skeletal Joaquin Phoenix), became an unintended catalyst for civil unrest in the first movie. This pathetic part-time party clown was just a manic-depressive nihilist who gleefully admits “I don’t believe in anything” while literally triggering mayhem with his gunshot subway slaughter of some Wall Street bullies and his on-air murder of late-night talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). His Joker was Id personified: no rhyme or reason, just pure catharsis. And it made for a trite film with a dark, coiled energy that struck a chord.

Now well-medicated, Fleck is a glumly docile resident at the Arkham State Hospital, Gotham’s go-to asylum for the criminally insane—here depicted as an Alcatraz-style prison on an island connected to the city by an impressively long access bridge. Because of his sedate demeanor, Fleck’s lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) feels confident that she can mount a split-personality plea defense in his upcoming trial for the five killings he committed. 

Gotham’s assistant D.A. Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) is seeking the death penalty, and Fleck seems resigned to his fate. But then he walks past a music class at Arkham and catches the eye of a fetching fellow inmate named Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga). She silently puts her fingers up to her temple and mimics blowing her brains out—Fleck’s favorite pick-up gesture. So suddenly he’s in love and starts singing Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life,” in the first of many scenes where Phoenix reminds audiences that he’s a perfectly mediocre vocalist in a movie co-starring a bona-fide pop star with a volcanic voice.

 Lee is a Joker superfan, and insists that she watched some TV movie that was made about him 20 times. “I’d do anything for you,” she tells him, after barely knowing him. She confesses that she’s a pyromaniac and torched her tortured home.  He digs it. “I love her,” he says. “She gets me.” Sure. 

Here’s the thing, though: they’re both crazy, so the filmmakers clearly decided they don’t really need to spend any time convincing the audience that these two are genuine soul mates. Crazy people are like that! So why spend time developing their infatuation? It’s easier just making them sing love songs to each other. Cue “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” presume the rest. 

Joker lives in a fantasy world anyway, so why bother justifying his behavior? As for Lee, she seems nuts, and talks about her broken home, although we’re told she’s actually from a wealthy family, went to grad school for psychology, and is at Arkham voluntarily. Which is why she can come and go as she pleases, even attending his trial in person. As for the bizarrely televised trial, it’s a self-evident slog and an excuse to cross-examine previous characters like bygone next-door crush Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) and freaked-out former co-worker Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill) for no other purpose than to relitigate the heartbreaking horrors of the last film. 

At times feeling like more like a photo-op than an actual narrative film, Joker: Folie à Deux seems like a reluctant sequel to a superficial study of a paper-thin character—except for the potentially dynamite casting of Lady Gaga as the infamous Joker moll Harley Quinn, which is an inspired idea. Except Phillips doesn’t do much with it.

And maybe that’s intentional. A generous interpretation of this film is that the contrarian filmmaker intentionally made a comic-book movie where the supervillain isn’t that super-villainous, his maniacal girlfriend isn’t very maniacal, and their wild romance isn’t particularly wild. The prison scenes are expectedly dreary, the courtroom tension is nonexistent—because the defendant makes no attempt to defend himself—and the musical numbers don’t really further the story in any tangible way. 

If only Phillips had developed what it means to subvert so many expectations, instead of using them to prop up a hollow shell of a story. To its credit, the film’s sudden climax is uncompromising—brave, some might say—because it’s also the logical ending to the story of a punctured soul who was both overwhelmed and betrayed by his notoriety. Then again, it also feels like a convenient way to simply stop Arthur Fleck’s madness forever. If you were expecting more from this sequel, then the joke’s on you.