Joker. Image courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures. .
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. Warner Bros. new film, Joker, is an amazing achievement of cinema. It looks great. Joaquin Phoenix is outstanding. It slots very cleverly into the wider DC Universe they were creating, without being of it. And it holds up a mirror to American society, forcing us to think about and confront things we might rather not.
I do not understand, at all, where reviewers are coming from when they call this film bad or boring or poorly made. Slate, that bastion of liberal socialism, was particularly hard on the film and I think that merely reveals the reviewers’ discomfort with the subject matter. This movie looks great. There is only one performance that matters, that of Joaquin Phoenix, and it is truly one of those electrifying, charismatic turns that glues you to the screen. Like Brando in Streetcar, or Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood - you can’t turn away from him. This character he has created, deeply troubled, both sympathetic and repulsive, is utterly fascinating. You might, justifiably, feel that director Todd Phillips is a bag of crap, morbidly fascinated by people who do bad things. But even so, he has made here a most excellent feature film.
Is it derivative? Yes, of course. It very, very consciously makes us aware that it is the narrative, stylistic and thematic successor of The King of Comedy, Taxi Driver and Network. I mean, the stunt casting of Robert De Niro and Scorsese’s involvement make that connective tissue pretty obvious. You might reasonably believe that those films do the same material better, but I don’t think that discounts what Joker is doing because the idea of society’s failures giving birth to vigilante revenge fantasies is obviously highly resonant in America, then as now.
Then there are all the nervous little birds coming out of the woodwork to argue that this movie is somehow dangerous because it glorifies and endorses the depiction of a pathetic, marginalized man finding catharsis by killing people. Some people have found this, in their idiot brains, to be an endorsement of incel culture, and there’s been a bunch of nonsense about how the film might inspire violent copy cats. As if that it the film’s fault, and not the fault of a deeply violent society that makes it easy for mentally disturbed people to get guns. That kind of criticism merely reveals what a wounded, fucked up and overly sensitive nation we are, unable to appreciate the art of a controversial depiction of darkness without worrying that insane people might try and live it out.
To the extent that this film creates a sympathetic, nuanced portrayal of Joker’s sociopathy is really a testament to Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. He is an obvious raving lunatic in this movie and you are not meant to identify with him; but you are meant to understand where his murderous apathy is coming from, how he is the victim of a society that doesn’t care about its most vulnerable members, and it takes a truly skillful production to pull that trick off. The film succeeds in showing us that the failure of society at large has driven this tragic, demented figure to do what he does. But if you are sitting there thinking the film is an endorsement of that kind of behavior, I think that says more about you than about the film.
Joker is also really interesting from a franchise perspective. Warner Bros. has absolutely mangled their DC Universe, ever since they let Zack Snyder take over from Christopher Nolan. This film hits reset on that mess. Unlike Snyder, Phillips is able to take the dark themes and imagery from Nolan’s Batman trilogy but give them a unique and interesting spin that doesn’t suck, and which stands on its own. The gritty 1980s feel, the beautiful compositions, the spurts of sudden hyper-violence, the oddly touching tragedy of watching a lanky weirdo run around in slow motion. This film has a visual style all its own, but it also does justice to the tone set by Nolan, something Zack Snyder was never, ever able to pull off. And it gives Warner Bros. a path forward, doing stand-alone films that are loosely attached to the larger mythology, but that don’t require them to bury themselves in failure trying to ape the success of Marvel.
Ultimately, I walked out of this movie deeply impressed with it. It is such a powerful acting performance, gorgeously staged and shot and scored. It conveys a visceral sense of a society in decay, and creates this deeply intriguing foil to examine the ways in which a hyper-violent society like ours might deal with that kind of rot. I think the Joker movie is a fantastic film, and also troubling - for what it says about society, and also for the way some elements in society reacted to it. I don’t yet know everything that this film says about our society, but I do know whatever it is saying is deeply fucked up.
