In what appears to be a remake of Falling Down with clown makeup, Joker has somehow ended up a critical darling, leading all films in 2019 with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, for this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a grim picture that manages to lionize a murderer, present an insulting image of mental illness, and retcon a major character’s backstory, driven entirely by the lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker descends into madness. (Joker is now available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)
Joker is a new origin story – because the world hasn’t had enough of those – for the most iconic villain in the Batman stories, a character portrayed quite memorably by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, among others. Arthur Fleck, played here by Phoenix, is a clown for hire, a meek, lonely adult man who lives with his frail mother and has the very rare condition known as pathological laughter, a form of pseudobulbar affect that is usually the consequence of a brain injury. He can be weirdly childlike, but only at certain times, and he has some sort of serious mental illness that requires seven different medications, although the illness is never identified. Most of the first half of the film shows how little use or regard society has for Arthur, until a series of revelations finally causes him to go off the rails, becoming the psychotic killer we recognize as the Joker.
There’s a clear intent to get after some Big Themes here, two in particular. The first, around mental illness and how little regard our society has for people who suffer from it, is the film’s major flaw and one I’ll return to in a moment. The second is a simpler depiction of growing economic inequality, with Arthur and his mother on one side of the divide, and Thomas Wayne and his family (including the young Bruce) on the other. Arthur’s first crime makes him a sort of inadvertent Gavrilo Princip, spurring a grassroots movement of people in clown masks railing against the 1%, while Thomas Wayne, here depicted as a cold, ambitious billionaire running for Mayor of Gotham (which differs from previous backstories), is a derisive, entitled man who hides behind wrought-iron fences and attends fancy banquets while showing no regard for anyone beneath him.
Joker‘s big failing is that Arthur should not be a sympathetic character. He describes himself in the film as a “mentally ill loner,” and he is utterly beaten down (literally and figuratively) and discarded by the dystopian-but-accurate society of Gotham, which, in the script’s logic, turns him into a gleeful killer. Several of his victims appear to have had it coming in this twisted worldview – he kills several yuppie douchebags on a subway train early in the film, and then later, after receiving some news that seems to cause him to completely snap, enacts revenge on multiple people in his orbit who have harmed him, and in each case the script seems to justify it. There’s more than a kernel of truth behind the story – the United States is about the worst place in the developed world to have a serious mental illness, especially if you’re not well-off, and of course it’s ridiculously easy for people who shouldn’t have access to guns to get one. The script just paints way too much of a straight line from mental illness to violence, which way too often mirrors both media portrayals of real-world serial killers and mass shooters – nearly all of whom look a lot like Arthur – and the excuses we hear from gun-rights people whenever there’s another massacre.
Phoenix does give a good performance here, although the role itself is written to be extreme, so his performance is going to stand out more for its sharper peaks and valleys; it’s a bit like a great hitter going to Coors Field and putting up video game numbers, where he’s still a great hitter but the superficial stat line may overstate the case. (As an aside, I did wonder if choosing the music of an incarcerated pedophile for Phoenix’s now famous scene on the outdoor staircase was deliberate.) Two of the best ways to get an Oscar nomination for acting are to play someone famous and to play a crazy person; Phoenix certainly got the second one, and he plays it to the hilt. He’s appropriately disturbing when he needs to be, although his affect when he’s just regular Arthur tends to come and go a bit, including his use of an infantile voice in certain scenes but not others. There are other good actors in this film – Bryan Tyree Henry and Zazee Beats are both wasted in minuscule roles – but no character gets beyond two dimensions, not even Robert Deniro’s talk show host Murray Franklin, although Deniro at least appears to be having fun with the role.
We’ve seen examples of genre films tackling serious themes successfully in recent years, including Black Panther, so it can clearly be done. Joker is not as successful, especially when it comes to its treatment of mental illness, and in the process also turns an incel into some sort of folk hero when the history of the character is that he’s a sociopathic villain. I don’t dismiss it as a comic book movie, but I do think it aspires to a level of seriousness it fails to reach, and in the process mixes its messages in a way that’s actively unhelpful. Todd Phillips getting an Oscar nomination for his direction here over Greta Gurwig and Lulu Wang is an absolute joke. I’m sure Phoenix is going to win Best Actor for this performance, but any more honors for Joker will only serve to elevate a movie that doesn’t deserve it.
