Joker Review (Patreon)

Obviously I'm writing this very late in the game. I wanted to see Joker after the exhausting discourse wore off, and indeed I waited until the last day my local cinema was having screenings to see it. Admittedly, this puts me in the risky position of being a critic with little to say beyond reiterating what everyone else has been saying for the last couple months, but fuck it, you're paying me, so I'm writing about the Insane Clown Scorsese movie.

On the whole, I really liked Joker, although not without caveats. My initial concern with the film's announcement was that it would be a dreary pseudo-Nolanesque journey through comic book subject matter that tepidly pretend to be a realist film. The Scorsese influence further compounded this worry, as it made it look like DC was going do "Taxi Driver but with superhero (an intriguing idea in its own rite, but easily one that could turn out to be self-serious drivel). To an extent, Joker fails to escape this Serious Comic Book Movie paradigm. It's a movie that doesn't shirk from the fact it's about manpain - indeed, the only way to convincingly explain a character like the Joker is to dig through layers upon layers of psychological torment. As a result, this is a movie that's exclusively about the suffering and perspective of a white dude, the climax of which hinges on a riot sparked by said white man's suffering. The perspectives of the film's women and characters of color are accordingly hedged, with Sophie being a virtual non-entity and Penny, a huge agent in the plot and the originator of much of Arthur's psychosis, is onscreen for probably less than a quarter of the film. There are a few ill-judged moments throughout the movie, most notably the use of Gary Glitter in a 2019 movie is fucking appalling and should have been stopped before it entered the film's production. For all that the movie is about nauseating acts of broken humanity, there's a difference between thoughtfully exploring said sickness and bringing a child rapist into the spotlight by playing his music over your lead character's transformation scene. 

And yet the movie works anyway. Its myopia towards Arthur Fleck is both intentional and the entire point. I prefer a rounded approach to storytelling, but Joker's shortcomings in this regard are mostly disappointing because the majority of it is very well sketched. Joker remarkably avoids the myriad of ways it could have gone catastrophically wrong (and a grim-and-gritty character study of one of the most over-signified villains in fiction has the potential to be an absolute disaster) by never shying away from Arthur's monstrosity. Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix achieve an astonishing balance of psychological identifiability and alienating horrificness for Arthur: he is a sick and broken man whose acts of violence are awful and lacking in any glibness or backwards joy. They are the broken actions of an empty man. Phoenix carries the movie in a performance he's clearly been waiting to give his entire career, building Arthur's character with flourishes that are scene-stealing yet understated (Phoenix as Arthur reminds me of Patrick Troughton - now picture that version of the Joker). And despite his general shittiness in interviews, Todd Phillips deserves credit here too. The way the camera begins to hold Arthur as an object of horror near the end, shooting him from below and in the shadows, adds to the sense that this character should be reviled and not identified with. 

Key to this is how Joker resists the temptation to have supporting cast who's ludicrously cruel to Arthur. James Cameron, for instance, has made a career out of films with supporting characters like this, who willfully obstruct his protagonists from achieving their goals (this, of course, says more about James Cameron than the real world). Joker's supporting cast is overwhelmingly normal people who are rightfully scared by Arthur's alienating and violent behavior. Arthur's status as an unreliable narrator is somewhat balanced by the rest of the world having more gravity and seeing him as the lost figure he is. He is the product of a broken world, his vulnerabilities and mental illness being created by a Society (which, as you all know, we live in) with contempt for its marginalized and othered. The film carefully avoids positioning Arthur's mental illness as the cause of his killings (and wisely avoids diagnosing him with a specific mental disorder), instead seeming to have it leave him vulnerable to situations in which he makes evil choices. This is a carefully measured film that risks being offensive, but instead offers a thoughtful meditation on the interaction of psychosis and violence.

The Gotham City of Joker is a decrepit wasteland: a barely veiled New York City. The film's decision to set itself in the early 80s is eminently wise, as it portrays a world in its death throes as it's squeezed by neoliberalism's tyrannical vice. There are glimpses of the Gothic, particularly in some shots of Arkham State Hospital (thank fuck they changed the name), and a generous dosage of the 30s and 40s the Batman mythos hails from, but this Gotham is a late capitalist one that's neither waiting to be torn down, nor must it be saved as in Nolan's vision. It's a dying city, one that's killing itself through its extended practices of austerity and waste. Joker's Thomas Wayne is a marvel: a callous billionaire prick whose devastating effect on Gotham remarkably fails to be undercut by Arthur's deluded perception of him. For my money, the highlight of the film is its portrayal of Bruce Wayne, or as I like to call him, the best onscreen Bruce Wayne ever. He is not Batman but a placid, joyless child who is lost even before the formative tragedy of his life. He is both monstrously privileged and fundamentally empty. The scene of Arthur reaching out to Bruce in the latter's private playground is not simply the high point of the film, but maybe the most quietly stunning scene in a Batman movie ever. 

That last statement isn't meant to elude the fact Joker is only tenuously a Batman movie - it is simply meant to put this moment in the context of the broader Batman mythos. This isn't a Batman movie, because Batman never shows up in it. It isnt' even in the vein of Watchmen, whose vision of superheroes' inherent horror is based in a story that's fundamentally science fiction. There are brief moments where Joker engages with other Batman stories - the unreliable narrator, Arthur's failed career in standup, and declaration of "I had a bad day" are copped from The Killing Joke, and the climactic talk show scene (yes, the stunning one where the Joker kills Robert de Niro live on network television) is on loan from The Dark Knight Returns - but Joker is mostly doing its own thing with Batman images. It concurs that supervillains, and by extension superheroes, are horrifying, but it's mostly telling a story about how characters like the Joker are born out of societal failures to address the conditions of the impoverished and mentally ill. Arguably this is still an adamant refusal to be a comic book movie, but where else is a movie about characters like the Joker maintaining such a strident refusal to be part of their mythology? Even the Dark Knight movies lean into the reliable iconography of Batman, and Zack Snyder's DCEU films, while heavily critical of their subject matter, are about what happens when gods come to earth and fight. Joker has no such assurance - it's about a broken world and the people that come to be in it. It's not uplifting, yet it's thrillingly intelligent and impressive. This is the best film to come out of the superhero genre since Into the Spider-Verse. I wouldn't want to see more movies in this vein, but I'm glad this one exists.

Now wait for DC to release a streak of R-rated thrillers about their other villains. Or a 2-hour dive into the mind of Barbara Gordon while she's being violently paralyzed.