2019 In Review: Joker

Ambiguous Joker is obviously the best Joker

AKA: The Joaquin Phoenix show!

Where Joaquin Phoenix carries a movie by himself, and the points don’t matter!

(Listen, folks whether the film is good or bad is irrelevant. It’s just refreshing to see a comic book movie treat its audience like adults.)

            

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 The following is an unapologetic unwinding of a lot of words. As always, to those who embark on this slow, descent into madness, you are the thing that keeps me going. Viewer discretion advised.

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*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT*

There is a difficulty in pitching a film like Joker to anyone. It’s technically a Batman movie with no Batman; certainly a comic book movie although nearly no traces of comic book history. As suspected the whole thing is pretty much Taxi Driver with clowns, but what the film ultimately results in, stripped down to its bare bones, is a psychological drama that just so happens to be about The Joker. 

  It sounds like a film that shouldn’t work (and for some it really doesn’t) but with a bleak change of pace in tone, this is precisely the goddamn breath of fresh air that the vibrant smog we currently call the comic book movie genre has been begging for.

  Already hailed as a masterpiece by some, and loathed as a lifeless waste by others, Joker is a polarizing enigma separating itself from nearly any other comic book movie ever made. Not since Ang Lee’s Hulk has a film taken such an ambitious stab at masquerading a comic book movie as an art house film. Even stranger is the idea that this is coming from the guy that directed the Hangover movies.

  Of course it’s flawed with rushed plot developments, over the top drama, and a hollow narrative, but Joker is so goddamned effective as a character study before ever being a comic book movie that whether or not that notion rubs people the right way, it makes for one of the most unique concepts ever conceived for a comic to film adaptation.

  Like a joke in itself, the film fools audiences into thinking they’re watching a comic book movie when it’s indubitably a piece about the decline of mental health, politics and a rebellion against society; a depiction of the death of one’s morality, rather than the birth of a supervillain. Sounds tedious and un-Joker like, but at least it’s unafraid to be what it’s not. 

  In fact, the film bares nearly no resemblance to any comic-inspired storytelling which of course defeats the purpose of it being a Joker movie at all, but this is also something a little deeper than just a retelling as to how the Clown Prince of Crime came to find his chuckle.

  Joker is significant in being perhaps the only comic book movie in the genre to heavily focus on only one singular character, and in doing so the film is able to strip the protagonist’s humanity down to its bare essence: a fragile man spiraling down a cruel world, on the brink of insanity.

  Despite this being the best thing Todd Phillips will most likely ever put out, this is a film which of course belongs entirely to Joaquin Phoenix, who literally puts on the performance of a lifetime. He doesn’t just carry the entire film alone. He’s so fucking good that most of the film’s flaws are completely forgivable by the end of it all.

  Phoenix isn’t just convincing, he’s downright heartbreaking, right from the opening moments. With no dialogue at all he’s able to convey a range of emotion that cannot be mimicked or replicated, separating him from Ledger or any other actor to ever portray the maniacal clown. It’s not that he’s better or worse, he’s just on a completely different level. Ranking Phoenix on a scale would just feel inappropriate because his performance is so incredibly personal.

  From his range of facial expressions, down to the way he dances to Frank Sinatra while ripping the drag of a cigarette, Phoenix transforms Arthur Fleck into a human before The Joker. The character daydreams of being a comedian, but is shattered by mockery. We see Arthur’s sincerity in caring for his elderly mother just as much as his lust for handling a gun. He fantasizes a relationship with his neighbor after a meet-cute in the elevator, but also cowers in fear by hiding in his refrigerator. Call bullshit on it “not being the Joker,” but this is a powerfully deranged character, even if boiled down to the millennial’s Travis Bickle in clown makeup.

  The film’s depiction of mental health alone is brutally raw, unlike anything from any comic book movie. Purposefully slow and unabashedly tragic, the film broils the audience in our protagonist’s life in order to have us unravel just how psychologically damaged he is. We spend so much time with Arthur to the point where the line between reality and delusion become blurred enough to have us question not just the ending but the events of the entire story.

  Even while Arthur’s psychological hallucinations are genuine, there’s enough ambiguity in the film to suspect his entire motive. For example, the character’s uncontrollable laughter throughout the film is presented as a clinical condition on what almost appears to be a joke card. We’re led to believe Fleck’s condition is probably authentic, that is until a scene where he ceases his cartoonish laughter the moment he rounds a corner, leaving us realizing that we know nothing.

  Arthur is the ultimate unreliable narrator throughout, which is why we can never truly trust what’s going on. Be them confirmed delusions or cryptic events; from imagining girlfriends to stealing files from Arkham, or disguising his way through a riot and into a theater; even being lifted out from a crashed cop car, and praised in the streets like a savior, Arthur’s entire existence often feels dreamlike, leaving many truths ending up feeling foggy.

  Even with that super ambiguous ending, Arthur asks his therapist if she’d like to hear a joke, only to respond by saying “you wouldn’t get it,” which for a film like this is perhaps the most meta closing line of any film in 2019.

  Fleck may not be the mastermind of the comics or agent of chaos in the films, but the enigma to his character is just as puzzling as any other iteration. Whether this version of The Joker is what the people want, Arthur Fleck is a three-dimensional character we come to understand as he comes to grip with (or loses) his reality, and transforms entirely. 

  The film begins with a man in a dressing room involuntarily putting on clown makeup, who has no sense of identity, and then gets the shit kicked out of him by teenagers. The film ends with a man in a dressing room deliberately in clown makeup, who has enough of an idea of himself to shoot a late night talk show host live on television, in order to make a statement.

  Arthur begins as a character we feel sorry for, and by the film’s end someone we’ve become afraid of. It’s a long metamorphosis but in this age of terror in America, it’s a well earned one; a slow-burn progression into a madness that we not only sympathize with, but sometimes even often root for. This is also why the film’s controversial themes of chaos and glorified violence tiptoe a dangerously thin tightrope of tolerance, but then again this is a movie about the fucking Joker, after all.

  To boot, some of the film’s most horrifying themes are those deeply rooted in political classism that mirror the world we live in today. Prior Batman-related films have always told us Gotham was a terrible place to live, but Joker quite literally submerges our point of view of the city as a seedy, crime infested black hole.

  Through Arthur’s point of view, the upper class citizens of Gotham are represented as Wall Street style douchebags; Even billionaire Thomas Wayne painted as a corrupted politician rather than a generous leader. This is why when Fleck shoots the three Wayne employees harassing him on the subway, the justice of his actions feel rectified, even though we know he is in the wrong.

  So much of the film’s satisfactions lie within Arthur having his way against a world that has constantly wronged him, be it stabbing a co-worker to death with scissors for being mean to him, or sparing another co-worker’s life for being nice, albeit not without playfully making a mockery out of it for some dark humor.

  This is a film sparingly infusing horror and comedy to show just how on edge the times are. It feels heavy and depressing, but it’s also frighteningly designed for the fractured America we’re currently living in, and the late 70s/early 80s depiction of Gotham is the perfect representation of the age of political warfare keeping us divided. 

  It’s a complete irony that the film paints Arthur as something of an anti-hero through the act of murder. Once the news hits the streets that a clown-masked vigilante kills wealthy employees, Fleck essentially begins a revolution against the injustices of society completely by accident. The city is already so terribly split that Arthur, rather than intellectually form a plan, becomes a symbol for the downtrodden people of Gotham without even trying.

  Although this notion goes completely against the traditional character in the comics, in this comparative light Fleck is the opposite side of the same coin for justice flipped by the ideals of a future Bruce Wayne, inevitably creating  the perfect nemesis for the Caped Crusader. Perhaps only in those parallels of the two sharing such vast representation for the people of Gotham does this version of the Joker bare any resemblance to the comics.

  Despite any such debates about what the movie gets “right,” the absolute chaos represented is arguably the film’s most terrifying aspect as to how real it all feels. Clear political comparisons aside, the film’s depiction of spontaneous violence hits incredibly close to home for the time we are living in. 

  Even with the unnecessary inclusion of the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, they are killed not in some big dramatic fashion, but shot during a fierce riot. Although this is such a monumental footnote in Bruce Wayne’s life, the moment is gone in the flash of a barrel of a gun, making for not just the most realistic, but perhaps the most bone chilling depiction of the Wayne’s death to date.

  For the world of terror in 2019, Arthur’s descent into madness feels earned because of how horrifyingly genuine his psychological collapse is, down to the visual metaphors in the way the character dreads walking up a long staircase, yet happily dances down that same staircase, accepting his full blown psychological declining.

  Of course it’s a reach but no less evident that this is a film that wholeheartedly embraces its nature of inevitability; the inevitability of chaos; the inevitability of murder; the inevitability of evil. And not an evil from a galactic supervillain, but the evil of mankind.

  Where origin stories about comic book characters can feel empty, Joker is here to say plenty, despite the film feeling like it has a one-track mind.

  This ain’t the feel good movie of the year, folks. It’s hard to come out with a sense of even liking it because of how genuinely dark and emotionally draining it is. This is also why it succeeds as a remarkable psychological character study; Bleak, grim, depressing and easily one of the most constructively unique comic book movies ever made.

  In 2008 The Joker asked us, “why so serious?” and for the next decade it felt as though comic book movies would never be serious again. In 2019 Perhaps Joker suffers from taking itself a little too seriously, but it’s a loud reminder that comic book films can still be ambitious, artsy and effective without relying on continuity, the visual vomit of CGI or the need for slapstick every beat of the script. 

  Akin to 2017’s Logan, Joker proves that aside from utilizing the hard R rating to tell a thematically mature story, the film contains such a strong contrast that’s been missing from the majority of comic book movies since The Dark Knight. This doesn’t excuse the film’s flaws, but Joker’s ability to simply be different is  not just refreshing, it’s flat out invigorating.

  Be this the Joker any of us wanted or not, in the end Phillips and Phoenix are merely providing their version, sticking to the character’s own philosophy of having an origin story as depicted in the comics. To quote the clown himself, “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.” With all the other incredible Jokers to choose from, this is just another colorful option.

But this one’s really for Joaquin.
Joaquin is the fuckin man.

*10,000 points to JoaquinHe literally holds the entire thing together