Joker: Folie à Deux could not be more of a failure

Joker: Folie à Deux, the hotly anticipated sequel to one of the handful of superhero films to transcend its genre trappings to strike a note with audiences and the critical masses, could not be more of a failure. The film feels so plainly contemptuous of its audience that it’s as if the filmmakers forgot they had to make a movie. While it should feel easy to commend the film for taking a swing at being a musical and missing, Joker 2 inevitably suffers from the worst cinematic sin of all: It’s painfully dull. The only risk that exists is in its concept; the execution is painfully pedestrian and artless.

Locked up in Arkham Asylum, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) stumbles into love one day as he passes a support room in the minimum security ward where inmates are doing musical therapy. Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) is a pyromaniac and a huge fan of Fleck’s murderous inclinations. The sudden beat of affection puts a song in his heart (quite literally) and drives Fleck to slowly embrace “clowning around” as a driving force of his upcoming legal defence. Structured in two distinct parts, the film is a portrait of Arthur and Lee falling in love, and a courtroom drama. 

There’s no doubt that many of the film’s musical sequences, as standalone scenes, are impressive. They’re bright, colourful and expensive, while the film’s production design really effectively recreates a classical style that leans into fantastic escapism and artifice. Upon closer examination though, the scenes begin to fall apart. They feel shoehorned into the narrative after the fact and as often as the sequences reveal something deeper about the character’s psychology, they often do not. Their integration within the film’s larger scheme reveals an overall lack of musical rhythm in the editing, and the transitions between fantasy and reality are clumsy and often lazy. Their failure seems caused, in part, by the film’s embrace of a version of cinematic realism that uses gritty dirtiness as a short-hand for real life. At best, they stand up as a monumental gift to Lady Gaga’s tremendous talents and charisma, and once uploaded to YouTube and TikTok, freed from their dull bookending scenes, they’ll wrack up the views.

Rather than elevate the film, these scenes not only drag it down, but unveil the fatal flaws in director Todd Phillips’ artistic process. He’s a competent commercial filmmaker with very little instinct for art. He values Hollywood functionality over artistic cohesiveness and he wastes a golden opportunity to do something fresh. Though in some ways the film feels like a direct address to some of the criticism of his first Joker film, he seems incapable of learning from his mistakes. Though the movie abounds with references like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, The Bandwagon and (again) Taxi Driver, it’s as if he fundamentally misunderstands what those films signify to an audience, and also how they work. The Taxi Driver scene, which mirrors Travis Bickle making a phone call, feels especially revealing. It’s sliced up, closed-up and rushed in a way that evokes the spiritual loneliness of the original scene only by name-dropping it, utilizing none of the techniques that actually make it impactful.

The film’s overall tone embraces cynicism and cruelty. Much of Joker 2 serves as a parade of humiliations that Arthur Fleck is forced to endure. Like a superhero version of A Little Life, he’s beaten, mocked and abused. The film’s lone sex scene is sickly and unimpressive; a dark, solemn scene that just feels like further humiliation for the character. In some ways, the entire presentation of Fleck as a narrow-shouldered, sickly idiot feels like part of a larger project to reject the success of the original film. Despite the enormous popularity of Joker, it’s as if Todd Phillips only internalized dissenters, while being openly dismissive of the film’s fans, so he created a version of the Joker that no one in their right mind would want to be like. He’s not an anti-hero rising up against the bullies, he’s a fragile, cowardly bully himself. The film almost dares the audience to like it, and unfortunately, Phillips lacks the skills to create something that’s actually provocative, so the whole thing just ends up falling flat. 

Without going into spoilers, the film’s ending in particular feels like the filmmaker’s desperate attempt to escape the trap he’s set for himself. At the end of the day, Joker: Folie à Deux, much like its predecessor, is a superhero film. It’s dragged down by the need to root the film in the Batman universe, something that seems to feel, at this point, like a prison for Phillips. Instead of proving himself able to transcend the material, though, he ends up locking himself into a sinking ship: even if this self-immolation guarantees he will never make another Joker film, he does little to prove he’s a real artist. ■

Joker: Folie à Deux opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, Oct. 4.

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