Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux
A joke without a punchline.
Early in Joker: Folie à Deux, we watch Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) daily routine: wake up, leave his cell, shuffle through life, return at the end of the night. He slumps into a small frame created by the narrow window, his silhouetted head surrounded by thick black walls and the hint of an orange sunset out of reach. As the guards slam the door, Fleck lights up a cigarette: a small orange spark echoing the last gasp of daylight outside. Someone inside there still wants to be free, but we won’t ever get much more of a hint of what that something is. Instead, we’ll see the same silhouette repeated about half a dozen times throughout the film—in the courtroom, in prison again, during a handful of musical fantasies—and none of the repetitions will have anything new to say.
Fleck, also known as Joker, is a prisoner at Arkham Asylum, a run-down, isolated version of Alcatraz plopped just off Manhattan, the grim antithesis of the Statue of Liberty on the other side of the bay. Fleck’s been in jail for the past two years, awaiting trial for the murders he committed in the previous Joker movie. The prisoners mostly leave him alone, and the guards are on pseudo-friendly terms with him, as if some form of his notoriety might rub off on them from proximity and they, too, might become famous by association.
Fleck is isolated, uninterested in his surroundings, and curiously ambivalent about the fame he so desperately wanted two years earlier. The movie keeps hammering the point home through detached montage: Fleck laughing maniacally in the prison yard in the pouring rain, Fleck walking alone through the halls with the camera trained on his face, everything else dulled by their distance from the camera and the movie’s disinterest in anything but Fleck’s inner life.
Whether Fleck has an inner life worth exploring is still unclear. The first Joker presented him as a lonely, unwell soul who’d been failed by his parents and by the state, coping poorly by working as a party clown and trying to break into comedy. As with the first film, here Phoenix makes considerable use of the awkward angles of his own body, his bare shoulder blades held at odd angles to each other in one scene where he’s shirtless, his arms reaching out for nothing in midair as he meditates, cigarette in hand, ahead of his trial. He might be putting on the Joker as a shield or a coping mechanism, or the two personas might belong to the same person. The movie is unable to make a case in any direction. The character remains a cipher.
The music doesn’t add all that much to the presentation, either. Folie à Deux is a jukebox musical, but it’s embarassed to be a musical at all. Song and dance are oportunities for self-expression, an outlet for strong wells of deep emotional feeling. None of the songs in this movie add anything that we didn’t already know about Fleck. When Phoenix sings, it’s in a scratchy mumbling tone that’s consistent with how the outside world sees Fleck, but it doesn’t reflect the character's earnestness in the first movie, nor do the songs demonstrate any depths to his character in the here and now. His spirit has been broken, and he has no direction, trapped as he is in Arkham. This could be a compelling character sketch, but the movie never knows quite what to do with its own medium.
Nor does the movie know what to do with Lady Gaga. It isn’t her fault. Her character, Harley “Lee” Quinzel is an arresting presence with a performance that intentionally grows more and more bold as the movie goes along, even as Lee is pushed further and further to the edges of the story. When we first get to know the character, we watch her deliberately set a piano on fire using a cigarette and some sheet music. It’s a grandly nihilistic gesture, an attempt to get alone with Fleck for just a few stolen minutes in the mayhem after the fire’s discovered, and Gaga owns the moment with an electricity that the movie simply can’t match. Nor can the script live up to her performance. She’s enamored of the idea of Joker, and Gaga sells her Lee’s commitment, but it’s unclear what, exactly, she sees in him.
What is here amounts to a shaggy-dog story, the kind of anti-humor that children in schoolyards will tell each other to try to earn a laugh from sheer absurdism. For a movie that’s trying so plainly to be taken seriously, it all comes down to empty posturing: a profile without any depth, a song without rhythm, a joke without a punchline.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★☆☆☆
Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters nationwide now.