Joker Brief Review

I watched the Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie over a couple of nights. It was a little hard to digest in one sitting.

Phoenix does a really good job with the acting, and it’s uncomfortable to watch. It’s rather clear that this was intentional, as the movie tries to take a grim look at how societies don’t really see mental illness. His constant laughter is portrayed as a nervous reaction where he can’t stop himself from laughing, to a point that he has a laminated card that he gives to people letting him know of his condition.

However, eventually the various ways in which he’s bullied and mistreated by the world get violent. It’s portrayed as being somewhat righteous in its indignation, and goes so far as to almost portray Batman’s father as a villain along the way. In fairness, Arthur Fleck — who eventually becomes the title character — has a mother who’s apparently as messed up as he is between the ears, who thinks that Arthur is… well, I’m not going to put too big of spoilers in this one. But it does flip the script on the origin story of Batman, portraying his parents’ death as the result of righteous anger against the rich, and the Joker is portrayed as something of an antihero raging against a system that never treated him properly.

Phoenix dropped over fifty pounds for this role, and he effects poses during it that make it very obvious that he’s not exactly in peak condition. In fact, some of the body angles he manages look really nasty on film.

There’s something to be said for the indifference of wealth. For the amount of money that Batman spends on weaponized vigilantism, one might think he could buy a lot of charity to help a lot of people escape the trap of poverty that leads to crime in the first place. Instead, he’s too busy beating them up and stuffing them in loony bins that obviously don’t help them very much. And this has been going on for generations. Perhaps Batman’s methods aren’t really helping much?

That said, the pseudo-origin story cuts perhaps a bit too much against the grain to humanize one of the biggest monsters in DC comics, and turns him into a victim instead of the criminal mastermind that he is. One sort of wonders how Arthur Fleck could stay ahead of the mob like Heath Ledger’s Joker constantly is doing, even if there’s a lot of madness to his method. Fleck doesn’t even know where he is half the time.

It also subverts the Batman origin story by making you sympathize with… well, is this guy the actual Joker? Is this actually the same person? Or is it an early iteration of a fellow that inspires Batman’s actual nemesis? The film’s directory deliberately leaves this vague, and has said as much as to the vagueness in press. If Arthur Fleck is an adult in his 30s or 40s when Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed, this would make the Joker something like 60 or 70 by the time he puts on the bat suit. While the Joker is frequently portrayed as a fairly old individual compared to Batman, that seems like it might be a bit much. I suspect the “this is an inspiration for the actual Joker” idea is probably closer to the mark.

But we don’t know. And there’s a lot of gaps in the overall story in spite of Phoenix’s performance. That the Joker, as a character in various forms, now becomes the second movie character played by multiple actors who both won Oscars for the performance (joining Vito Corleone of the first two Godfather movies) is something. But the film is ultimately quite dreary and probably bait and switches us as to what we’re actually seeing or whether this is actually the real Joker.

I give it a 3 out of 5. Phoenix’s performance is good. But the rest of the movie is a bit of a mess and hard to watch, and like most Batman related movies, it takes itself way too seriously and goes too far out of its way to paint Gotham as a place we’d really rather not be. For me, it’s just a bit too much to give it more than a “reasonably good, but not a classic” rating.

Thanks for reading.