After watching The Dark Knight, which I loved because of Heath Ledger, I would tell literally anyone who would listen that I thought that the movie would have been better if the entire movie was devoted to the Joker, then the film ends with the Bat Signal and Nolan showing Batman seeing it. The sequel would be devoted to Batman trying to stop the Joker. Well, if I made the Batman franchise, my movies would have ended there because Ledger died so there could not be a sequel. RIP. So I love the idea of Joker, which I believe was Todd Phillips’ idea, and I want to give him credit for committing to an unrelenting, disturbing, unglamorous look at a well-known DC Comics villain.
One of my favorite movies is John Carpenter’s Halloween, but I still watched Rob Zombie’s take on the classic because I like Zombie as an artist (in small doses). I prefer inexplicable, random evil, but if a filmmaker is going to root their character in the real world and engage in armchair psychoanalysis, which I love, then it needs to actually convince me of a cohesive, diagnosable mental illness that I can recognize instead of the cheap, Hollywood take on Freudian issues, and Joker seemed as if it was a grab bag of symptoms that did not completely mesh into a cohesive profile. Why does he have to be skinny and have an eating disorder? Why does he have to have a laughing condition? Either Phillips, the writer and director best known for making dude comedies such as Road Trip, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, The Hangover franchise, which are great, or Joaquin Phoenix really needed to understand the character that they were trying to depict before shooting whereas it seems as if they spontaneously explored and gradually discovered him after they were shooting. For all intents and purposes, Phillips is a first-time director in this genre, a psychological crime drama with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver meets Andy Kaufman serving as the inspiration. It was probably his first stab at making an artsy fartsy film, and I feel as if he needed a mentor, preferably Lynne Ramsay, who expertly guided and reined in Phoenix for a perfect and equally unhinged performance in You Were Never Really Here, or at least watched it a thousand times then imagine the protagonist as a villain. Edward Norton should have consulted. Phoenix is the kind of person that will live his character—remember I’m Still Here. Fortunately Joker is not that self-indulgent and unwatchable as Rapey Affleck’s film, but it is too long and did not successfully sustain my interest for the entire film. It had me at the beginning and the last half hour or more is superb, but Phillips earnest, deliberate efforts to tie it into the DC Comics universe and heavy-handed stab at making it germane to socioeconomic issues hurt my suspension of disbelief.
If Joker is as old as Phoenix, then he is a man in his mid-forties. I could not buy that he did not remember huge swaths of his life, especially because of trauma. He should have remembered something, and the middle is all about revelations for him. It also bugged me that we never find out what he did to get committed off screen. Phillips kind of wants to have it both ways. He wants his film to be a standalone film, but he also relies on his audience’s expectations about the character to fill in the blanks. If it is going to be a standalone film, and this Joker should stand apart from Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson and the legend Ledger, who is still my favorite, then it is important to know what he thinks got him scrutiny. He knows when to be evasive and lie so I do not buy that he has memory issues.
Because I watch a lot of films, I can spot an unreliable, delusional character right away, and I interpreted Joker as a film committed to mostly depicting and literally projecting his delusions so you cannot entirely trust that anything in the film as objective truth except when he is violent. The actual acts of violence may also be a delusion, but they are spiritually epiphanies for Fleck about himself and what he truly wants.I actually like the idea of doing this, and I understand why Phillips briefly disrupts the delusion to show reality so the audience can comprehend the narrative, but I feel as if he should have waited until later and pulled a M Night Shyamalan at the end to explain all of Fleck’s delusions or never shattered the delusion. One way that he could have done it visually is the palette of the film. The longer that Fleck stayed off his meds, the colors could have changed. Most of the film reflected how Fleck saw the world-sickly greens and yellows, a literal jaundiced view of the world, but instead of staying at that tone for the entire film, he could have gradually increased it until it fully dominated the film at the end. Side note: loved the shots of my favorite city even if it is covered in trash and burning.
Phillips also let liking his titular character get in the way of being completely unflinching, and he was ultimately unwilling to show Joker in a way that would alienate him from audiences. Phillips wants us to like Joker as much as he does. He shows Fleck doing a number of horrible things, but never to a person that the audience would hate him for hurting, and for me, this is Phillips unforgiveable sin, which ruined the film for me.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
Fleck clearly kills his next door neighbor and her daughter, but Phillips punks out and does not show it because Phillips wants us to like Fleck. If you want to be edgy and dark, you need to go all the way, and Joker lost all its street cred at this point. Every other act of violence, though inappropriate, can be vicariously enjoyed as satisfying revenge, but if Phillips did that, he would be evil. It is possible to be a victim, become evil and become a victimizer. The one consistent trait of Joker is that he clearly snaps when his delusions of being adored are punctured. The closest diagnosis of Fleck comes from Dr. Ramani Durvasula. Fleck has a covert narcissist feel, which makes the dancing moments fit into the movie nicely. My favorite early scenes are when his boss is laying into him, and he just plasters a smile on and audibly disassociates or when his mom says that he is not funny, which is a direct contradiction of his story about their relationship, “She always tells me to smile and put on a happy face. She says I was put here to spread joy and laughter.” She literally never does in the entire film. I almost wished that the Wayne interaction was completely deleted, and Fleck just killed his mom for that casual observation at that point. I wish that it was like a rumored Cloverfield movie or Split where you do not realize until the end that we are in the DC Comics universe then I would have been impressed, but instead I was bored.