I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore
It’s too bad that Todd Phillips’s new film Joker has to be about DC Comics character The Joker. Within a fairly conventional origin story, albeit a super-villain origin story, a wrenchingly bleak portrait of unrelenting pain and anguish strains to emerge.
We spend agonizingly long amounts of time trapped in skin-pore level closeups of The Joker, née Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). Living alone with his mother (Frances Conroy of Six Feet Under), Fleck suffers from a cartoonish affliction that causes uncontrollable cackles to wrench his face for long, tense moments. It’s suspiciously unfortunate, then, that he chooses to work as a clown, and aspires to become a stand-up comic, two professions that, apart from being very public, require lots of physical control. Fleck lives and works in America’s most dysfunctional metropolis, Gotham City, art directed to resemble early 80’s New York City.
Arthur lives in a world of unrelenting negative news, borderline social unrest, and crushing income disparity that makes our current environment look almost utopian. His only relief is nightly viewings of Live with Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), an obvious nod to the Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show. In some worlds, a character like Fleck would escape to an elaborate fantasy world, or scheme with a few good friends. But even Fleck’s fantasies remain run-of-the mill brushes with greatness.
Cinematographer Lawrence Sher floods the film’s palette with cool tones – lots of grays and blues – so that even broad daylight feels cold and clammy, and production designer Mark Friedberg clogs streets with struggling small businesses, and idle crowds milling around. His daytime sets communicate a world whose inhabitants are barely hanging on. And his nighttime sets are filled with menace.
Intro this world clomps Arthur, an oddball clown who can’t control his laughter. He twirls a sign outside a failing store, until some kids steal it and run off, and we’re faced with the sad scene of first a clown decked in oversized shoes trying to chase fleet-footed teens, then getting beat up moments later when he’s ambushed in an alley.
His clown colleague Randall (the surging Glenn Fleshler) gives Arthur a gun for protection, and an unspoken threat, but later the gun clatters to the floor of a children’s hospital sick ward dance routine. The scene is wrenching, as after spending long stretches of time in Fleck’s world of failure, he seems to actually be doing an okay job of cheering up the kids.
The gun plays a central but accidental role in Fleck’s transformation to the Joker, and from here to its ultra-violent climax, the film achieves something remarkable.
The challenge for Phillips and Phoenix is to give us a believable character who is obviously psychotic, but also sympathetic and approaching lovable. The script, by Phillips and Scott Silver, helps by keeping dialog spare, and leaving plenty of space for Phoenix to communicate physically. He reportedly lost over 50 pounds for the role, and we follow not only his sunken and exhausted face, but marvel at shots where his shoulder blades threaten to pop out of his bare back. As Fleck’s transformation gathers steam, not only does his demeanor change, but he literally starts to move through space with new animalistic and predatory grace. As events unfold, Fleck seems to befriend Sophie Dumond (the fantastically-named Zazie Beetz), who gives Fleck something worth living for. But film editor Jeff Groth cuts the film so as to give us just a few hints that all is not reality, yet never is so obvious as to reveal what’s really happening.
By the end of the film, the world we are in is so morally ambiguous, and though a bad moon is clearly rising, we are left in a state of constricted anguish. We know that things will not end well for Fleck, but given what we know and what we learn about him, we can’t help but feel real sympathy. Fleck isn’t evil. He has tried and tried and tried to work within the system. But the system – his family, his work, his friends, his loves – have all utterly failed him. What’s left to do?
What happens next is the basis for the so-called controversy surrounding the film. I will weigh in only to say that anyone attempting criticism, let alone passing judgement, absolutely must see the film first. Yet, it must be said that allowing our current film-going public to see this film and not understand the very complex artistic project at work – and just see a simplistic justification for horrific acts – is quite scary.
Unfortunately, the film must ultimately adhere to the genre’s constrictions, which devalue it quite a lot. We’re forced to see the birth of a super-villain in the traditional comic book way, and then suffer through a simply baffling flashback which makes almost no sense.
Approach Joker cautiously. Appreciate it for Phoenix’s superb performance, and Phillips’s achievement of cinematic moral ambiguity, but understand it’s a character study forced into the straitjacket of a DC Comics origin story
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Joker opens today in Bay Area theaters.
