JOKER REVIEW: Love it or hate it, the Joker movie presents a thought-provoking masterpiece of belong

A mesmerizing lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix gives Todd Phillips’s divisive reimagining of the comic villain raw power and a frightening following in Gotham City.

Worries that Joker – the new movie from Warner Brothers documenting one possible origin of Batman’s nemesis, the Clown Prince of Crime – would spark violence from disaffected young men were remarkably overblown. There was no violence and the film has broken box office records. More importantly, the opening garnered an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival in August, where it scooped the top prize, Todd Phillips’s (yip, that same guy who gave us The Hangover) has also given us the origins picture about the birth of Batman’s cackling nemesis has become the focus of a moral backlash across the entire planet, and particular America, with critics using words such as “toxic”, “cynical” and “irresponsible” to describe its relentlessly embittered (and allegedly glorified) tone. Moviegoers walking out on the film at numerous venues, and high police protection too.

Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn in The Dark Knight, Joker has an ace card in the form of Joaquin Phoenix’s mesmerizingly physical portrayal of a man who would be king. Phoenix is known for his method-acting and it shows as he is reduced to a skeletal state (think Christian Bale in The Machinist, but worse), and Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a tragicomic nightmare in his own right.

At the beginning of “Joker,” Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), seated in front of a mirror, hooks a finger into each corner of his mouth and pulls. Up, then down: a grin, a grimace.

Arthur is a clown, and a would-be comic, but he’s really not funny at all. He is a much more beleaguered, sign-twirling clown who suffers from a medical condition that turns his internal screams into cackling laughter.

Bullied, abused and increasingly enraged, Arthur lives with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in Gotham, a city befouled by garbage strikes and overrun by mutant rats. He dreams of becoming a standup comic but has no idea what other people find “funny” – a lethal combination.

The problem is that Arthur isn’t particularly funny. He’s painfully awkward, the kind of twitchy, social incompetence people shy away from in public because his erratic behavior feels like it could turn dangerous — or at least uncomfortable for them.

As well as befriending, or imagining that he has befriended, a single mother (Zazie Beetz) who lives in his building, he meets with a social worker (Sharon Washington), appointed by the city, who monitors his medication. We learn from her that Arthur has been institutionalized in the past, and he carries a card that he shows to people when they flinch away from him. It reads “Forgive my laughter: I have a condition.”

Arthur gets a gun to protect himself from a colleague, drops it a kids’ hospital, uses his gun for the first time, by shooting a hole in his apartment wall, and another in which he slays three wealthy elite workers on a train, and that’s when the real shit kicks off.

Also, we get two father figures. One is Murray Franklin played by the legendary (Robert De Niro), the host of a TV talk show, under whose wing Arthur dreams of finding shelter and approval.

The other is Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a wealthy brute who is running for mayor of Gotham. (He has a young son named Bruce. Get it?) Thirty years ago, Penny Fleck worked for him, and Arthur hopes to exploit that distant link, though Wayne has nothing but scorn for the Flecks of this fragmented world. “Those of us who have made something of our lives will always look at those who haven’t,” he declares, “and see nothing but clowns.”

As Arthur goes on a killing spree, Gotham begins to burn (the civil unrest starts with a garbage strike), Fleck, who has been taken as a vigilante by much of the city’s 99%, doesn’t quite know what to make of his underground cult stardom. The city is beset by rioters in clown makeup and clown masks and the ending is neatly wound up, as The Joker strikes again, trying to escape from the mental asylum.

Much has been made, by Warner, and I guess DC Comics, of the fact that this is meant as a “standalone” film that has no narrative connection to other pictures in the DC Universe, but that’s having your cake and eating it too when you still name your lunatic asylum “Arkham” and your cinematic DC Universe is GIVING YOU Batmen every twenty minutes OR SO.

FLASHPOINTS:

By the film’s end, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has inspired a mass protest movement, all right. But it’s one that’s aimed squarely at the 1 percent of Gotham. Fleck’s murder of three investment bankers becomes a flashpoint, pitting Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) – a billionaire and would-be mayor who simply wants to make Gotham great again in the face of decline, corruption and violence – against a group of masked bandits wielding “RESIST” signs and whinging about fascism.

HEATH VS JOAQUIN

There’s a shot toward the end of Joker that echoes a previous iteration of the character: his head against a cop car window, staring out, he sees the chaos he has caused and begins to smile. One can’t help but think of Heath Ledger’s head out the window of a cop car, taking the wind in his hair like a dog whose owner has let him up in the front seat. But the differences between the two characters are vast. Whereas Ledger’s Joker claimed to be an agent of chaos all while setting up infinitely intricate plans and plots, Phoenix’s Joker is that chaos.

There can be no Phoenix-lovers without Phoenix-haters — or, at least, people who weren’t moved enough by his performance to consider him a better Joker than Ledger.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

In a case where people leap to extremes, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The slow-burn of the first act is slow and tedious but when we finally get to see Batman Mythology gleaming through to the surface like a sharp-edged blade, this is where the film kicks into gear and goes full-throttle.

Sure, Joker may make some people who feel uncomfortable and marginalized and feel more seen and more powerful, and they may act out in response. There are some ugly, self-serving messages in the movie, too, which is incongruously bent on creating sympathy for Batman’s worst enemy and one of DC Comics’ most notoriously callous mass murderers and atrocity architects.

“Joker” is good in some parts, dour in others. But besides the wacky pleasures of Phoenix’s performance, you’ll either gonna love it… or hate it. But the film does spin up a tempting fantasy of persecution and relief, of embracing nihilism as a means of complete escape from a terrible world.

3.5/5 STARS