Well, this one has been getting a lot of press, mostly because the media loves to write about incels for some reason these days and have been talking about this movie because they think incels will love it. It’s kind of becoming a thing. If women were as interested in those sad psycho incel fucks as writers from shitty content-farm news sites, maybe incels would never have even been a thing. But anyway – Joker is the new movie by Todd Phillips, director of the Hangover, featuring Joaquin Phoenix’s mad dash to get an Oscar nomination as the titlular iconic DC villain.
SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!!!
Director: Todd Phillips
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert DeNiro, Zazie Beetz
Honestly it’s a pretty well made movie – and, also, kinda bullshit at the same time.
It looks very good. It’s gritty and dark in the way that a lot of old art-house films were, with a lot of grungy lights, winding labyrinthine city-scapes and shots of Phoenix being crazy and laughing a lot. Boy, does he like to laugh in this. It’s definitely a thing that he probably had to get super into character and shout at a lot of people on set for disturbing him about.
The movie starts out with some scenes setting up his shitty life – he works as a clown mascot character spinning signs for people and gets mugged and the shit kicked out of him by some kids. I mean they really go in on him – how bored are they even? Kinda overkill. He talks to a therapist occasionally, but that ends up getting nixed because of city budget costs or some shit, which leaves him with no real outlet for his feelings and no meds, either. That’s actually pretty real and I wish they would’ve just left it at that.
But nope! On the subway, he shoots three douchebag Wall Street bros who are harassing a woman – not a great loss to society. However, this has an unintended consequence when billionaire and mayor candidate Thomas Wayne (something tells me he’s important to this universe) goes on TV the next day and says the poor and mentally ill are clowns! That starts a mass riot in the city with everyone wearing clown masks to protest the rich being assholes! It all makes sense if you don’t think about it too much. I appreciate the movie trying to do this kind of class warfare plot, but honestly it’s kinda shallow and dumb if you think about it even a little. Like, the scenes of the mass riots later on in the film are inaccurate because in real life, the cops would be out there pepper spraying and shooting them before it gets as far as it does.
Meanwhile, Arthur Fleck is spiraling into madness, doing things like bringing guns into hospitals where he’s trying to entertain children – though, really, his dancing and singing alone is disturbing enough without the gun. This was by far the funniest thing in the movie for me, when the gun falls out of his pocket. He gets fired from his weird clown job for it, though, which probably, maybe, won’t be good for his mental health either!
One part I did like was the inclusion of a subplot about him “dating” this girl in his building, only it turns out he was just fantasizing about it the whole time; revealed quite well in a scene where he breaks into her apartment and she finds him, very surprised and confused. And his interactions with his mother and weird scenes of him alone in his apartment are done well.
All of it is pretty kosher so far – it’s kind of a believable portrait of a mentally ill man, and maybe could have actually been artistically valuable, had they stuck to this line of things.
BUT… they didn’t. Instead, we get some ~shocking~ plot twists where he finds out he was adopted and maybe related to the Wayne family or something. It’s pretty stock, low-brow, hack type shit. Phoenix sells it well, but this was where the movie lost me. I think much of the rest of the film, in which it begins to quickly escalate into violence and killing, doesn’t have near the nuance it wanted to – it seems forced, a square peg into a round hole. Why does he even put on the clown getup? Because he wore it for a job he got fired from? Once he starts murdering people randomly, it is expected but also happened so easily that you wonder if therapy ever would’ve worked on this dude anyway. He doesn’t seem different after he stops taking his meds as opposed to before, really.
As a comic book-y origin story, a Batman tie in, it’s kind of a fun, depraved trip – Phoenix sells everything super well, as I’ve already mentioned, and the tying of the fictional Gotham to real-world class strife and turmoil is interesting if not that well fleshed out. There are a few little things that tie into long-time Batman lore and those are fun, even though not the main focus.
But as a social commentary it’s weak and shallow. Oh, mental health care is bad and the rich are assholes. So what? What exactly did that do to Arthur to turn him into the Joker? These themes were basically dropped after the first 30 or 40 minutes. We don’t know much about him as a person at the end of it all. As the movie shows us, the real nail in the coffin was when he finds out his mother was lying to him and then hears he was actually adopted. All that other stuff was ancillary – the real root cause of madness and incel terrorism is finding out your birth mother was your adopted mother!
Todd Phillips made headlines last week when he bitched in an interview about how he only made Joker because he felt like he couldn’t make comedies anymore because of “woke culture” or whatever. His stated intention with the film was only to make a fucked up “real movie” and disguise it, Trojan Horse style, as a comic book movie. The finale of this movie sees Joker giving a big speech on live TV about how society wants him to conform and won’t let him be himself – whoa, real edgy stuff there, movie! Then he kills Robert DeNiro’s TV comedy host character live on camera. I don’t even get what the Joker’s whole spiel about society oppressing him has to do with anything else – the problem in the film was never that he was censored or told he couldn’t be himself, it was that he was spiraling out of control inevitably anyway due to a shitload of factors.
All of the edgy violence and the weirdly pornographic, sympathetic way it portrays Phoenix’s Joker in the climax, along with Phillips’ dumb ‘hey, I’m a 14 year old’ style statements, gives the whole thing a sour douche-bro vibe that taints my impression of the film. It doesn’t seem like it was made for a good reason. Despite their talk about how they didn't make it to endorse violence, the movie sure is all over the Joker at the end like a horny teenager. I don't believe it'll cause violence but come on, to act like this isn't totally on his side is dumb as shit.
But I guess the Joker was created by society, man. Isn’t society the worst? Let’s all go post on a 4chan board somewhere.
There are some interesting and cool scenes in this, but as a social commentary it’s flat and over-simplified. It just skims the surface on the problems and decides to wimp out with cliché shit about family mysteries instead of really digging in. Phoenix’s incredible performance goes a long way toward making this seem deeper than it is – if a lesser actor were in this role it’d seem like the pseudo-edgy try hard stuff that a lot of it actually is.
It’s a shame because there were plenty of individual scenes that worked. But as a ‘man is broken by the world’ story, it’s just not very compelling unless all you wanted was a Batman story. Taxi Driver, one of the film’s inspirations, was much more convincing and eerie in its realism, and Better Call Saul, as a TV show, has more time to flesh out the character and portray complex motivations that lead to a downfall.
But hey, at least it’s better than the Jared Leto Joker from a few years ago! There is that.
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