'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   In the film's early going, Arthur seems weirdly withdrawn, a canny strategy on Phoenix's part.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.

     

Phoenix gets behind the make-up in 'Joker'

Dark, violent and brooding. Is this a comic-book movie or a shrieking cry for help?

Set in a decaying, rot-infested Gotham City, the Joker attempts to show what happens when society’s “invisibles” are pushed to the breaking point. Kicking fanboy comic-book nostalgia to the curb, Joker brings us face-to-face with the madness that festers beneath the surface of a corrupted society. If Joker were to have a subtitle, it might be: Joker: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

But wait. Am I talking about Joker, the villain who Batman has been fighting for years and who previously has been played by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger and who now falls into the hands of Joaquin Phoenix? I am.

Joker, which marches to one of the year's most ominous drumbeats, was directed by Todd Phillips, whose resume includes such raucous comedies as Old School and the Hangover movies. Who knew that Phillips had this kind of haunting, violent and grime-encrusted effort in him?

But then Phillips never worked with Phoenix before and Phoenix, in many ways, is the movie — with everything else working to support the insanity, insecurity, and terror of an incomparable and frightening performance. I don't think it's stretching the point to say that Phoenix and Phillips have used comic book characters to create an anti-comic-book movie.

Having lost considerable weight to play the Joker — a.k.a., Arthur Fleck — Phoenix borders on the skeletal; he’s portraying a man who’s virtually disappearing. His occupation (clown for hire) puts him behind a mask that, at least initially, doesn’t liberate him but pushes him further into anonymity while also subjecting him to any number of cruel derisions.

Everything about Arthur screams misfit, including a disorder that causes him to burst into choking, maniacal fits of laughter that can appear indistinguishable from crying jags and which have no relation to anything that's happening to Arthur at the moment.

Mugged and severely beaten early on, Arthur is prey awaiting rebirth as predator. It’s not an easy transition for Arthur, who previously was institutionalized and who now lives with his mother (Frances Conroy) in a shabby Gotham apartment building, which he reaches by ascending a steep flight of punishing stairs.

Imprisoned in a child-like state, Arthur only escapes his loneliness when he’s violent. Arthur cares for his diminished mother, even washing her hair as he sits tubside over her nakedness. Hardly good preparation for developing mature relations with women.

I have no idea whether Phillips and Phoenix set out to make this kind of movie or whether it evolved as they began to work together. If the latter, they trusted their instincts and built everything around Phoenix's performance from Mark Friedberg's dystopian production design to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s musical score, which emerges from the screen like a moan, the sound of a soul being crushed.

Set in dingy apartments, dirty subway cars, and littered streets, Joker becomes a vivid, night-crawler of a movie in which its comic-book roots are only half-heartedly acknowledged, and perhaps didn't need to be there at all.

The movie introduces us to young Bruce Wayne, who, of course, will grow up to be Batman. Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is an imperious tycoon with contempt for the masses he proposes to save by becoming the city's mayor. He calls them "clowns."

All of this produces a movie that’s compelling in ways that challenge convention while also drawing on the movie past, most notably Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy. Not only has Robert De Niro, the star of King of Comedy, been cast as a talk-show host, but Arthur aspires to be a standup comedian, a pursuit for which he has no aptitude. He scrawls his idea of jokes into a notebook full of incoherent scribblings, hardly a manifesto.

Yet, when Arthur turns to violence — he shoots three drunken Wall Street types in a subway melee — his actions give rise to a social movement in which protesters don clown masks and shout down those who are rich enough to immunize themselves against the city’s rot.

The irony flows easily because Arthur has no interest in politics. He doesn’t want to change the social order; he wants to be seen, to bask in the limelight of an existence that's finally acknowledged and even celebrated. And, yes, Phoenix's performance also generates pity for this misbegotten figure.

Joker harbors one glaring false note. Arthur tries to form a relationship with a single mother (Zazie Beetz) whose attraction to Arthur challenges credibility. Arthur is too weird for this or any other relationship. Is Beetz's character's attraction to Arthur akin to the concern one might feel for an abused child? Whatever it is, it doesn’t ring true.

You probably know that Joker already has generated controversy. It won the top prize at the recently concluded Venice Film Festival but has been criticized for being too violent, for having the potential to cause violence and for encouraging facile enmity toward achievement and wealth.

On violence: Yes, the movie’s violent and, yes, it contains hints of brutal aggression toward its audience. It’s as if Phillips and Phoenix, with no small amount of defiance, want to challenge audiences to examine their love of villains and their taste for blood. They’re asking what happens if we strip away comic-book protections and show the real thing?

As a result, Joker brings its violence closer to us than most horror movies. Unlike in It Chapter Two, for example, evil isn’t something that recurs in 10-year intervals with supernatural assists; it’s lodged in the twisted psyche of the guy in the apartment next door. It's Taxi Driver's Travis Bickel reborn into a normless world.

Are the movie’s jabs at elitism and wealth justified or simplistic? Simplistic, of course, but don’t misunderstand. Joker isn’t a movie that's likely to inspire profound thoughts or discussions about its deeper meanings; it seems to want what its main character wants for himself, an inescapable and independent existence.

When Arthur fully emerges as Joker, he dances down those same steps that he climbed every day as he headed for his lonesome retreat. It’s a wild, uninhibited release of energy played against Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll, Part 2 -- and it's coming from a figure in clown make-up with a blood-red rictus drawn on his gaunt face.

That moment and others like it -- particularly when Phoenix incorporates dance into Joker's repertoire -- stand as unnerving bits of performance art: frightening, dangerous and eerie. It’s mad anarchy unleashed: terrifying and, in one harrowing moment, in charge. If that doesn't rattle you, I don't know what would.

Batman in a world gone batty

Had director Christopher Nolan wanted to be totally accurate, he would have renamed his Batman movie, "The Really Dark Knight."

For me, "The Dark Knight" title just doesn't do justice to how grim Nolan's movie can be. Yes, it's based on characters from DC Comics, but "The Dark Knight" has the kind of tension and bloodshed we expect to find in realistic thrillers. That seems to be what Nolan is striving for, and he certainly achieves it. The opening scene -- a bank robbery staged by The Joker and many accomplices in Joker masks -- rivets attention like few recent heist movies. And the movie seldom lightens up. Its pedal to the metal gloom is so prevalent that the few attempts at humorous one-liners seem misplaced. This is Batman with a severe case of depression -- and you know what -- Nolan may be onto something. It's as if he's decided to deny us the pleasures associated with comic-book movies and once-and-for-all propel Batman into graphic novel turf.

Ethical questions -- unusual for a mass entertainment -- echo through "Dark Knight." What does morality mean in an age of terrorism? Should anyone be expected to behave rationally when confronting an irrational foe? Can anarchy be fought by non-anarchic men who accept moral limits? You'll find no reference to places as such as Quantanamo, but today's headlines resonate through "Dark Knight" just the same, lending a topical edge that Nolan surely intended.


You've probably read that the centerpiece of this Batman isn't Batman; it's The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger with a level of intensity that shakes the movie to its core. Batman -- a.k.a. Bruce Wayne -- is not especially appealing or intriguing. Maybe that was unavoidable. I'm not sure how Christian Bale could have competed with Ledger, who pushes himself toward some unseen edge. He disappears behind the Joker's psycho-clown make-up.

The rest of the cast is in fine form -- notably Aaron Eckhart as a crusading district attorney, Maggie Gyllenhaal as his girlfriend and fellow prosecutor; and Gary Oldman as a plodding detective. Any one of those actors could have -- and has -- carried his or her own movies, and I haven't even mentioned old pros Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman.

If you see "Batman'' in an IMAX venue (which I did) you'll have a difficult time not being wowed by the overhead shots of skyscrapers, by Batman's vertiginous leaps through night air and by the sheer scale of the destruction wrought by the Joker, a fiend who kills without compunction. He's not afraid to put children at risk. He's the devil's own master of ceremonies at a party devoted to chaos. He even blows up a hospital.

If there's fault to find here, it's with the script. An overloaded plot sometimes tramples minute-to-minute logic. Still, it wouldn't hurt if audiences actually listen to what Nolan, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan, has to say: It's as if he's rubbing our noses in our taste for superhero blockbusters. You want violence? OK, I'll give you violence, only I'm going to take it further than you expect. You want evil? I'll give you evil, but I'm going to turn it into a message from hell. You want some meaning in your mass entertainment? I'll give you that, as well.

You get the idea; Nolan refuses to wink at the audience. If he wanted to his dark beauty of a movie to leave us feeling chastened, he has succeeded, which means "Dark Knight" may not be the summer movie audiences expect. "The Dark Knight" is a superhero who engenders both admiration and scorn. He's Batman for a time in which the world's moral compass has spun as wildly out of control as the movie's frantic chases. Simply put: This Batman plays for keeps.