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   In the film's early going, Arthur seems weirdly withdrawn, a canny strategy on Phoenix's part.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

Selling arms for fun and profit

Miles Teller and Jonah Hill team for a comic thriller about gun runners.

It's impossible to watch War Dogs without thinking about such recent movies as The Big Short, American Hustle and maybe even Wolf of Wall Street. Director Todd Phillips (The Hangover Trilogy) has made a movie about a couple of buddies who wind up trying to outsmart the US government with a $300 million arms contract that involves faulty and illegally shipped bullets.

Making a movie about amoral characters isn't easy, even when that movie has an infectiously jaunty spirit. Because we spend a lot of time with the buddies played by Miles Teller and Jonah Hill, War Dogs puts us in the awkward position of rooting for a couple of gun runners without asking that we give much thought to the ramifications of their business.

Hill plays Efraim Diveroli as an overweight hustler without qualms. Teller portrays David Packouz as a person who hasn't entirely lost his moral compass, but the movie is best as a conventional bromance that deals in stark incongruities: A couple of ill-prepared novices trying to cross Iraq's "triangle of death" with a shipment of Berettas and a guide named Marlboro, for example.

The partners' trip to Iraq qualifies as an exception to their standard business practice, which involves reaping as much profit from war as possible without leaving their Miami offices. The idea is to make money without getting shot at.

As explained in the movie, Diveroli understood that serious money could be made by bottom feeding; i.e., landing the small contracts that the big arms dealers ignored. Lots of small contracts added up to big money.

A lot of what the two men did was perfectly legal -- until it wasn't.

Hill -- not exactly a physical specimen to begin with -- has put on weight as if to demonstrate that Diveroli is encased in his own gluttony. He loves money, cocaine and prostitutes. Hill gives good sleaze, complete with slicked back hair and a high-pitched, near maniacal laugh. A poster of Al Pacino as Scarface hangs above Diveroli's desk.

As the more conventional of the two, Teller's David has a wife (Ana de Armas) and small daughter. Initially, David hides his business from his wife, who thinks that he's selling high-quality sheets to Florida homes for the retired. David did try his hand at that business until Diveroli invited him to join his lucrative venture.

Diveroli's arms operation -- his company is called AEY -- is financed by a dry cleaner and Orthodox Jew played by Kevin Pollack. Pollack's character believes -- or wants to believe -- that he's investing in a business that supplies arms to Israel.

Following a well-worn path, Phillips shows the exhilarating kick of making large amounts of money. The partners move up in the world, buying fancy Miami apartments and indulging in ample amounts of high living.

Credited to three writers including Phillips, the screenplay focuses mostly on Teller's David, a man who starts the movie as a masseuse. David's early picture financial failures make him vulnerable to Efraim's advances.

The two men knew each other as kids, and were best friends at the local Yeshiva. David also serves as the movie's narrator, our guide through this tainted world.

You probably know from previews of coming attractions that War Dogs makes room for Bradley Cooper. Cooper plays Henry Girard, a shady arms dealer whose name appears on the terrorist watch list. After what appears to be a chance meeting in Vegas, Gerard offers to sell Efraim and David 100 million rounds of bullets for AK-47s, allowing them to bid on a contract that would result in their biggest score ever.

It's a bit late in the review to mention it, but War Dogs is based on a true story that derives from a 2011 Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, who wrote also tackled the subject in a book, Arms and the Dudes.

Despite his penchant for gross-out comedies, Phillips has directorial chops, and he uses them effectively in scenes set in Jordan, Iraq, Albania, Las Vegas, and Miami. Phillips proves capable of handling the globe hopping this kind of comic thriller requires.

What's missing from War Dogs, which can be entertaining, is a real sense of an arms trade that inflicts considerable harm on large numbers of people. It's a war movie without casualties.

Phillips may be too addicted to fun to go all the way to seriousness. For all of War Dogs' antic energy, I couldn't help wishing Phillips had taken a bigger step in that direction.

'Hangover III': Big finale or big fizzle?

It's difficult for me to call the latest Hangover movie anything but a major disappointment.
Two big-screen money machines are set to invade the nation's multiplexes this week -- the third movie in the Hangover series and the sixth Fast and Furious movie. We begin with the Hangover Part 3, which opens a day earlier than Fast and Furious 6 -- and which is considerably more disappointing than its speed-obsessed competition.

As just about everyone now knows, the first Hangover movie became one of 2009's monster hits, a surprise attack of blatantly crude humor that boosted two careers, those belonging to Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis.

Cooper, of course, went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for his work in Silver Linings Playbook, and Galifianakis has become an indispensable addition to a long line of taste-defying comics who'll step across almost any line.

The series' third -- and apparently final installment -- probably won't hurt either actor, even though The Hangover Part III a half-serious (and none too exciting) thriller plot hijacks most of the laughs.

The movie's first joke (already spoiled by its trailer) involves the decapitation of a giraffe. This bit of animal carnage arrives courtesy of Alan, the proudly stupid character played by Galifianakis. Obviously, the filmmakers did not behead a real animal, but the off-putting joke (one of many) was enough to make me consider becoming a card-carrying PETA member.

The familiar crew (Cooper, Ed Helms and Justin Bartha) returns under the guidance of director Todd Phillips, whose slick approach seems at odds with the ragged spirit of the best Hangover jokes. Putting this kind of production value into a Hangover movie seems as misguided as hiring James Levine to conduct an all-kazoo orchestra -- not that Phillips qualifies as a maestro of movies.

This episode adds a couple of new wrinkles. John Goodman portrays a gangster who's upset about the fact that the sexually dubious Chow (an over-exposed Ken Jeong) has stolen millions in gold from him. Melissa McCarthy appears as the operator of a Las Vegas pawn shop where Chow unloads the purloined gold.

A scene in which McCarthy confronts her cinematic soul mate (Galifianakis) teeters on the edge of being funny without quite tumbling into the expected hilarity.

The story eventually sends our heroes back to Las Vegas, perhaps in hopes of recapturing some of the brazenness of the hard-partying first movie. The strategy produces an insufficient number of laughs while Phillips plays around with thriller tropes and the actors await their obligatory doses of humiliation.

Oddly, there's hardly any drinking in this installment, and the only real hangover stems from whatever residual affection audiences can muster for characters whose unashamed pursuit of pleasure has led them into many drastically compromising situations. Put another way, Hangover Part 3 runs on whatever comic vapors linger from the first installment.

I've never been a big fan of the Hangover movies, but I certainly understood the appeal of the first movie, which pushed the envelope of grossness to what approached genre-breaking limits. I was unimpressed by the overproduced waste of the second and entirely dismayed by a third edition that stops in Tijuana before heading to Vegas.

A sequence following the end credits pays homage to the outrageous spirit of the movie's 2009 predecessor -- but it's a classic case of arriving too late to make much difference. Hard-core Hangover fans who stick around for this epilogue -- which boasts the movie's wildest sight gag -- may think that this is precisely where Hangover Part III should have started.

Road trip or road kill? A bit of both

Some laughs, but on a road trip from hell.

They say if you can survive a long car trip with someone, you're probably well suited to have that person as a real friend. The new comedy Due Date asks us to take a cross-country drive with two actors who should have been great comic company: Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis.

But after awhile, it's clear that a road trip augmented by gags, gross-outs, drugs and overproduced car carnage can wear you down. I kept wishing that Downey and Galifianakis could dig themselves out from under the movie's mountain of humor - much of it built around wildly inappropriate behavior - and find a rest stop.

Although there are chuckles along the way, this highly anticipated road-trip comedy proves a hit-and-miss affair, probably as the result of second-rate material that goes for easy laughs and exaggerated weirdness. To those who love director Todd Phillips' work -- namely The Hangover - some of the movie's odd- couple pairing may hit the spot, particular if you like masturbation jokes and other behavior that's supposed to be funny because it's so obviously beyond the pale: Downey's character punching a kid in the stomach, for example.

Say this: Phillips gets the contrivances out of the way quickly, pushing Downey's Peter Highman, an architect, into a cross-country car trip with a total stranger, Galifianakis' Ethan Tremblay. Ethan, an aspiring actor who shows no evidence of talent, is headed for Hollywood. Peter's eager to arrive in Los Angeles where his wife (Michelle Monaghan) is about to give birth to their first child.

It's supposed to be a classic pairing of opposites. Peter is quick to lose patience with Ethan, who's transporting his father's ashes in a coffee can and whose marijuana habit forces him to stop at the out-of-the-way home of a dope dealer (Juliette Lewis). Circumstances also prompt a visit with a guy who once dated Peter's wife, an underutilized Jamie Foxx

Downey, whose character takes a pretty bad beating during the course of the film, can't always save this material, nor can Galifianakis, who sports a perm and who - as he usually does - appears frighteningly sincere and totally off-the-wall at the same time. Galifianakis gives his character a strangely effeminate walk, and seldom is seen without his pet bulldog, a critter that provides the filmmakers with a reliable laugh prop. Ethan isn't just an oddball character, he seems to be in need of institutionalization.

There's only so much you can do with an odd-couple formula. Maybe that's why Phillips attempts to pump up the proceedings with car crashes and chases involving Mexican border patrolmen, portrayed in annoyingly stereotypical fashion.

And how clichéd is this? At one point, Galifianakis' character says, "I'm not an accountant. I'm not even Jewish."

Not exactly inspired writing.

It's a safe bet that most comedy fans will note that Due Date sometimes plays like an updated version of Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but it's a misshapen offspring that doesn't always do the lineage proud. Considering the combined talents of the movie's principal actors, Due Date should have delivered a whole lot more than it does. I got a few laughs to be sure, but I was ready to shed these two sorry travel companions long before the movie ended.