'Joker: Folie a Deux' -- dread with music

 

   Director Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) plunged into the heart of the rot-infested Gotham, where Arthur Fleck became the Joker, a maniacal misfit whose life had turned into an agonized scream, sometimes disguised as hysterical laughter. The result was scary, haunting, and grim.

   To deliver a sequel, Phillips has made a bold choice.   Joker: Folie a Deux adds musical numbers as part of the soundtrack and as performances. The story also  brings Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) into contact with Lee (Lady Gaga), the character who, in other movies, will evolve into Harley Quinn. 

   If you want an alternate title for Folie a Deux, try Psychopath, the Musical.

   Phillips opens the movie in Arkham, a fortress-like prison for the criminally insane. Amid a population of bereft inmates, a skeletal Arthur awaits trial for murder -- six of them.

   In the film's early going, Arthur seems weirdly withdrawn, a canny strategy on Phoenix's part. Arthur's eerie detachment fits the dark mood established by Hildur Gudnadottir's pounding, ominous score, reprised from the first movie.

    The screenplay lays the groundwork for Arthur's trial. Arthur's lawyer (Catherine Keener) wants to employ an insanity defense. She'll argue that the vicious Joker lives inside poor Arthur's tormented psyche. Arthur doesn't connect to this alternate self and hardly remembers his murderous outbursts. Abused as a child, Arthur's a wimp who can't accept his fiendishness -- or so his lawyer says.

      Gotham's district attorney (Harry Lawtey) argues otherwise; he dismisses talk of Arthur's alternate personality as hooey.

    As a Joker fan, I was predisposed to appreciate the inventiveness Phillips might bring to this sequel, which punctuates the movie's encompassing bleakness with musical numbers that evoke memories of a bygone Hollywood era.

   Phillips pays homage to musicals when Arthur watches a scene from 1953's The Band Wagon featuring the song, That's Entertainment; a number that's later performed by Gaga to highlight a theme found in both movies: the exploitative tendency to bestow celebrity status on notorious criminals.

   Lee and Arthur meet in Arkham, where she's serving time for arson. Lee belongs to a musical club that's supposed to help broken inmates heal. A prison guard (Brendan Gleeson) arranges for Arthur to join the group. Not only is Lee a fan of the Joker, but she's a kindred spirit, a lover of chaos.

    The match may not be as fortuitous as it seems. Arthur thinks he's finally met a woman who can pierce the thick walls of his loneliness, the prison he lives in whether he's behind bars or not. The poor sap wants love; Lee craves thrills.

    Phoenix adds sorrowful undertones to Arthur's edgy unpredictability. Gaga, who delivers lovely vocals, turns Lee into a thrill-seeker looking for a playmate. 

    Phoenix sings in a reedy yet effective style that's applied to songs such as When You're Smiling, an anthem for the Joker whose face is plastered with a lipstick smeared rictus. At one point, he fantasizes about appearing on TV with Lee, giving Phoenix and Gaga an opportunity to perform a duet.

    A movie that opens with a mock Looney Tunes cartoon has no interest in settling for formula. Whatever you think of Folie a Deux, it's impossible to accuse Phillips of taking the easy way out.

     He also tries to give the movie some moral weight. Leigh Gill delivers a brief but affecting performance as Gary Puddles, a witness in Arthur's trial. Puddles testifies about the harrowing consequences faced by those who come into Arthur's orbit.

    Familiar themes -- turning violence into entertainment and the twisted narcissism that craves celebrity -- remain, but Phillips, who wrote the screenplay with Joker co-author Scott Silver, doesn't generate enough story to keep the movie from losing steam.

    Folie a Deux begins to peter out about three-quarters of the way through its two-hour and 18-minute running time. Courtroom scenes undercut the dread that festers during Arthur's imprisonment, and the film's ending ... well ... let's just say, the movie ends.

    Reservations aside, I want to conclude with an addendum. This edition of Joker may not entirely work, but it's daring, ambitious, and ungainly in crazy  ways. Phillips' bold choices don't all pay off, but they beat the fan-serving rehash that might have been.

     

Diving into one woman's alcoholism

 

    Saoirse Ronan's deeply realized portrayal of a 29-year-old alcoholic struggling to conquer her addiction might be reason enough to see The Outrun, a movie based on a 2017 memoir by Amy Liptrot. 

   In the hands of German director Nora Fingscheidt, the movie can feel bleary-eyed, almost inebriated. Shifting back and forth in time, The Outrun brims with rue and regret, unfolding in piecemeal fashion on the Orkney archipelago off Scotland's northern shore. 

   Forget notions of island idyls; the island we see become studies in desolation. Waves crash against forbidding cliffs, powerful reminders of the devastations that follow alcohol-fueled trajectories . Dizzying heights smash their way toward self-destructive lows.

   Ronan's Rona gives the movie its twisted spine; Rona equates alcohol with happiness. Her drunkenness mixes barroom bonhomie with embarrassing, fall-down stumbles.  Her good times usually turn sour.

   The story provides telling glimpses of Rona's island upbringing with a bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) and a devoutly religious mother (Saskia Reeves). The movie doesn't blame Rona's upbringing for her alcoholism; her mother may be a staunch believer, but she's also kind and caring.

   During Rona's childhood, her father's mental illness added to the domestic turmoil; in yoyo fashion, he dropped in and out of institutions.

   Paapa Essiedu portrays Rona's boyfriend, a young man she pushes away when she becomes abusive. He's forgiving -- until he reaches his breaking point.

   Living a bare-bones existence, Rona is tasked with monitoring the movements of the corncrake, a threatened species of bird. Flingsheidt seems interested in watching Rona try to synch her internal life with the surrounding natural world.

    Not everything about The Outrun leaves a mark. At times, the movie climbs the 12-step ladder. We may have seen too many confessional scenes to find much that feels fresh about Rona's participation in meetings.

   The movie's time shifts require constant  adjustment, and The Outrun can't quite reach the poetic heights Fingscheidt strives for, particularly with references to Selkies, mythological creatures that can morph from seals into humans. 

   Still, Ronan’s brave, uncompromising performance carries the movie through the raging journey of a damaged soul seeking repair. 

Bob's Cinema Diary: Oct. 1, 2024 -- 'The Wild Robot' and 'Wolfs'

Here are two quick, catch-up reviews of two movies that I couldn't review on their opening days. Blame scheduling conflicts and movie overload. The Wild Robot, which has won favor with both critics and audiences, has the potential to become an animated classic. Wolfs, on the other hand, a disposable feel of familiarity, a comic thriller in which Brad Pitt and George Clooney break little new ground.

 

The Wild Robot. Can a robot develop emotions? Can that same robot bond with an orphaned gosling and become its surrogate mother? Can the robot, an automaton that lives apart from other robots on a wooded island, be accepted by the island's natural denizens?  Based on 2020 bestseller by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot provides a stylish and often poignant response to these questions. Rozzum Unit 7134, voiced by Lupita  Nyong'o, becomes the movie's centerpiece as the robot develops relationships with Fink, a sly fox voiced by Pedro Pascal. Kit Connor does the voice work for Brightbill, the gosling. Director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stich, How to Train Your Dragon) offers a mixture of cartoonish action, layered meaning, and appealing characters as both Roz and Brightbill struggle with issues of belonging and connection. Eventually, Roz's maker sends a more strident robot (Stephanie Hsu) to retrieve the wayward bot and wipe its memory. Skillfully animated by Brown's team, The Wild Robot stands as family entertainment that avoids the worst pitfalls of such fare, notably unearned sentiment. Although it leans heavily toward children, adults may appreciate the way the movie balances the predatory instincts of animals with their need to achieve common goals.

Wolfs

Brad Pitt and George Clooney team for a comic thriller about two men with unusual jobs. For handsome fees, they dispose of bodies that otherwise might lead to murder indictments. As loners who've never met before, Pitt and Clooney's bickering fixers are pushed into an uneasy alliance; they must get rid of the body of a young man (Austin Abrams) who had been taken to a high-end New York hotel by a politician (Amy Ryan) looking for a fling. Nothing like a body on the floor to ruin a reputation. Pitt and Clooney deliver the expected banter, but the story, which unfolds during the course of a single night, doesn't feel nearly as offbeat as might have been intended. Undeniable star power boosts director Jon Watts's (Spider-Man: Homecoming) effort, but Pitt and Clooney can't make this stale vehicle shine.