{"id":8207,"date":"2020-01-27T09:40:48","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T14:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8207"},"modified":"2020-02-09T12:27:40","modified_gmt":"2020-02-09T17:27:40","slug":"joker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/27\/joker\/","title":{"rendered":"Joker."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In what appears to be a remake of Falling Down<\/em> with\nclown makeup, Joker<\/em> has somehow ended up a critical darling, leading all\nfilms in 2019 with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and\nBest Adapted Screenplay, for this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a grim picture\nthat manages to lionize a murderer, present an insulting image of mental\nillness, and retcon a major character’s backstory, driven entirely by the lead performance\nby Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker descends into madness. (Joker<\/em> is now\navailable to rent on amazon<\/a> and iTunes<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joker<\/em> is a new origin story \u2013 because the world\nhasn’t had enough of those \u2013 for the most iconic villain in the Batman stories,\na character portrayed quite memorably by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, among\nothers. Arthur Fleck, played here by Phoenix, is a clown for hire, a meek,\nlonely adult man who lives with his frail mother and has the very rare\ncondition known as pathological laughter, a form of pseudobulbar affect that is\nusually the consequence of a brain injury. He can be weirdly childlike, but only\nat certain times, and he has some sort of serious mental illness that requires\nseven different medications, although the illness is never identified. Most of\nthe first half of the film shows how little use or regard society has for\nArthur, until a series of revelations finally causes him to go off the rails,\nbecoming the psychotic killer we recognize as the Joker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a clear intent to get after some Big Themes here,\ntwo in particular. The first, around mental illness and how little regard our society\nhas for people who suffer from it, is the film’s major flaw and one I’ll return\nto in a moment. The second is a simpler depiction of growing economic inequality,\nwith Arthur and his mother on one side of the divide, and Thomas Wayne and his\nfamily (including the young Bruce) on the other. Arthur’s first crime makes him\na sort of inadvertent Gavrilo Princip, spurring a grassroots movement of people\nin clown masks railing against the 1%, while Thomas Wayne, here depicted as a\ncold, ambitious billionaire running for Mayor of Gotham (which differs from\nprevious backstories), is a derisive, entitled man who hides behind wrought-iron\nfences and attends fancy banquets while showing no regard for anyone beneath him.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joker<\/em>‘s big failing is that Arthur should not be a\nsympathetic character. He describes himself in the film as a “mentally ill\nloner,” and he is utterly beaten down (literally and figuratively) and\ndiscarded by the dystopian-but-accurate society of Gotham, which, in the script’s\nlogic, turns him into a gleeful killer. Several of his victims appear to have\nhad it coming in this twisted worldview \u2013 he kills several yuppie douchebags on\na subway train early in the film, and then later, after receiving some news\nthat seems to cause him to completely snap, enacts revenge on multiple people in\nhis orbit who have harmed him, and in each case the script seems to justify it.\nThere’s more than a kernel of truth behind the story \u2013 the United States is\nabout the worst place in the developed world to have a serious mental illness,\nespecially if you’re not well-off, and of course it’s ridiculously easy for\npeople who shouldn’t have access to guns to get one. The script just paints way\ntoo much of a straight line from mental illness to violence, which way too\noften mirrors both media portrayals of real-world serial killers and mass\nshooters \u2013 nearly all of whom look a lot like Arthur \u2013 and the excuses we hear\nfrom gun-rights people whenever there’s another massacre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phoenix does give a good performance here, although the role\nitself is written to be extreme, so his performance is going to stand out more\nfor its sharper peaks and valleys; it’s a bit like a great hitter going to\nCoors Field and putting up video game numbers, where he’s still a great hitter\nbut the superficial stat line may overstate the case. (As an aside, I did\nwonder if choosing the music of an incarcerated pedophile for Phoenix’s now\nfamous scene on the outdoor staircase was deliberate.) Two of the best ways to\nget an Oscar nomination for acting are to play someone famous and to play a\ncrazy person; Phoenix certainly got the second one, and he plays it to the\nhilt. He’s appropriately disturbing when he needs to be, although his affect when\nhe’s just regular Arthur tends to come and go a bit, including his use of an\ninfantile voice in certain scenes but not others. There are other good actors\nin this film \u2013 Bryan Tyree Henry and Zazee Beats are both wasted in minuscule\nroles \u2013 but no character gets beyond two dimensions, not even Robert Deniro’s\ntalk show host Murray Franklin, although Deniro at least appears to be having\nfun with the role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ve seen examples of genre films tackling serious themes successfully in recent years, including Black Panther<\/em>, so it can clearly be done. Joker<\/em> 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<\/em> will only serve to elevate a movie that doesn’t deserve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1146,1144,1142,1077,215],"class_list":["post-8207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-best-actor-nominees","tag-2019-best-director-nominees","tag-2019-best-picture-nominees","tag-2019-movies","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8207"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8209,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions\/8209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}