Formula:
(The King of Comedy + (Taxi Driver * The Dark Knight))
This is the Joker origin story. You know how it ends.
The challenge of this movie is finding an interesting way to show how he gets
there. Interestingly enough, the two best villain origin stories I can think of
are both tied to Breaking Bad. There's Walter White and Jimmy McGill (in
Better Call Saul). The story of Walter White is a man who is beaten down
by the world and decides to take control of it. Walter White doesn't really
become the infamous criminal Heisenberg. Rather, he reveals that Heisenberg was
always in him by eventually choosing that path, even when he's offered chances
for redemption. Jimmy McGill is a man who tries to be good, even when everyone
else expects him to be bad. Eventually, the world beats him down so much that
he decides to be the rotten man everyone thinks he is (Saul Goodman/Slippin'
Jimmy). He's not like Heisenberg who was always secretly rotten. He just loses
the good in him so that only the bad is left. Either of them offer an excellent
template for a villainous transformation.
Then there's Arthur Fleck. Arthur is a professional
clown and aspiring stand up comedian. He takes care of his sick mother in the
rundown apartment they share. He has psychological issues, including a hysteric
laugh that he can't control. He's barely holding it together with the seven
medications he's on. He's prone to having delusions of grandeur, thinking that
has has a greater purpose. And he lives in a complete hell hole.
Gotham of 1980(ish) is a rotten place to live. The
economic disparity is comically severe. From what I can tell in the movie,
there are no good people in the whole city. Kids on the street steal signs from
clowns and beat the shit out of them for no reason. Wall Street types beat
people up on subway while singing show tunes with very little provocation. Every
rich person wears a tuxedo and is comically duplicitous*. This city is a
ticking time bomb.
*Perhaps my favorite exaggeration of the movie is
when Arthur sneaks into an extremely fancy movie theater where people are
rioting outside. Inside, it's full of rich men and women wearing suits and
gowns watching Modern Times (a 40
year old movie), laughing like it's the funniest movie ever made and it's their
first time seeing it. Something about it screams "This is what rich people
live like, right?"
Throughout the movie, things go from bad to worse
for Arthur. He gets beaten up. He's fired from his job. His mother's condition
is gets worse. He finds out horrible things about his childhood. He steps in
dog shit on the street every day, old ladies spit on him as he walks by, and
there's always a small rain cloud 4 feet above him*. The first time he decides
to fight back, he ends up murdering some 1%ers, which accidentally starts a
movement. The lower class starts to riot as Arthur learns to embrace the chaos.
*Those last couple things don't actually happen, but
they'd fit right in if they did.
That's a combustible formula: psychopath off his
drugs + a city in revolt. If done right, that could make for an excellent movie
how far you can pull a rubber band before it snaps. However, there are a few
problems I have with this in the movie.
First, Arthur isn't an interesting character.
Joaquin Phoenix gives an interesting performance. It's intense and brooding.
The way he bends his body is unsettling and unnatural. His laugh is haunting.
Phoenix is the same raw nerve that he was in The Master except he's more
willing to let loose with it. I want to give his work the fullest praise I can,
especially because he's got a dud of a character arc. Much of it comes down to
the fact that it's never clear what is his personality and what is his
psychosis. By the end of the movie, when he embraces the nihilism, is that
because he's off his meds or because he's letting his true self out? It's never
really clear. I'm all for some ambiguity, but this movie is a character study.
If I'm coming away from it with just as little understanding of the character
as I came in with, then what's the point of watching the movie at all?
Second, Gotham isn't a real city. I don't mean that
it can't be found on a real map. I mean the city isn't consistently drawn
throughout the movie. The way it's presented most of the time is as a hell hole
full of crime, where each person is worse than the next. So, why are Arthur's
murders on the subway such a big deal? That can't be the first time businessmen
in a sketchy part of town have been killed in Gotham. And why are people
reading into the murders so much? A man dressed as a clown killed some men. I
don't see how that gets read as the poor trying to take back the city from the
rich. This movie treats it like V for Vendetta, but that guy was
meticulous and vocal with a specific message. Arthur is just a clown who killed
some people, and no one else even knows the full context of the situation. They
don't know it was three bros beating up a psychologically unwell man. They
only know a clown killed three upper class guys. It could be an attempted
robbery or some kind of unprovoked assault. I simply don't buy that those
murders would be the match that lit the flame that burned the city to the
ground.
Thirdly, what is the movie even trying to say? There
aren't any good people in the movie. This isn't the world going to hell. It
already is hell. It has an "eat the rich" message simmering
throughout then has Arthur reject that for anarchy. It doesn't even make sense
that he becomes their cult hero. The riots are already starting before he goes
on that talk show. Then, on the show, he specifically says that everything they
are rioting for he doesn't care about. I have no idea what the movie is trying
to tell me. It has no opinion.
Fourthly, how is Arthur's transformation into Joker
interesting? Arthur isn't smart or clever. He doesn't engineer the city to
riot. He's just lucky a couple times. He happens to not get caught after the
first murders. Somehow, the police don't arrest him for bringing a gun to a
hospital. He steals his mother's files at Arkham Asylum without penalty. The
only reason he escapes after the talk show murders is that his cop car happens
to get hit during a riot that luckily is happening at the same time.
Ultimately, this is the story of a psychopath who does bad things, doesn't get
caught, and is mistakenly praised for his actions. It's Forrest Gump written by
Frederich Nietzsche and Sid Vicious. And don't try any of this meta-narrative
bullshit. This isn't Todd Phillips and company commenting on anarchy and
nihilism but writing a script that doesn't follow the rules of narrative and
theme. That's giving them way too much credit. Besides, it follows far too
closely to the structures for me to believe they're trying to break them.
Since this is theortically a review, not just a
rant, I should touch on a few things other than the story. The photography is
appropriately ugly (I mean that in the good way). It shows a city in decay, and
the many close-up shots are unnerving. Phoenix fully commits to the role and is
engaging every second he's on screen. Other characters played by Robert De
Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen mostly fit with the world
as Arthur sees it. There's some nice dark humor thorough the movie. The music
is enjoyably eclectic. It purposefully never settles on a tone. I think
everyone in this movie was working toward a vision of the film that the
screenplay (and perhaps editing) never quite earns.
Walter White was a bad man who spent a long time
pretending to be good before revealing how bad he actually was. Jimmy McGill
was a man with bad tendencies who genuinely wanted to be good, until he finally
gave up and let the bad take over. Both men were offered chances at redemption
and rejected them. They are interesting characters. Joker tells the
story of Arthur Fleck. Arthur is a bad man, dulled by medication, who stops
getting his medication and reveals himself to be confidently bad. It's less of
a transformation than a refocusing, and in the end, that makes for a pretty
uninteresting movie and character. At best, Joker is a collection of compelling
scenes with a poor narrative holding them together.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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