Joker Review

Joker

Dir: Todd Phillips

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen

The power of laughter is an amazing characteristic. Laughter composes so many emotions, happiness and sadness and everything in-between and beyond. Laughs are uniquely individual, sometimes they are contagious, other times they can be scary, and in some occasions, they can be forged. 

Joaquin Phoenix utilizes a maniacal, nervous, and ultimately tragic form of laughter to compose an unstable character, the DC supervillain “Joker”. Phoenix, in a completely amazing, transformative performance, is placed within a shallow, depressing, and somewhat pointless film that is aspiring for thoughtful insight on numerous subject matters but instead meanders into a place of emptiness. 

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonesome, damaged man working as a sign-waving clown, moonlighting as a stand-up comedian who keeps a journal of jokes, in the dingy, rough streets of Gotham City where desperate kids steal his sign and entitled men beat him up on the subway. Arthur is struggling in life, he is meeting with a psychologist and taking medication for his concerns, one of which is an uncontrollable laughing condition that signals some kind of substantial past trauma. Arthur lives and takes care of his ailing mother (Frances Conroy), who once worked for the storied Wayne family in Gotham, holds fond admiration for a late-night television show host (Robert De Niro), and has a crush on a girl (Zazie Beetz) who lives in his apartment complex. But Arthur is slowly breaking at the same time as Gotham City, leaving both man and city in a desperate place. 

“Joker” has a lot of narrative wheels spinning; ideas concerning the state of mental illness and the lack of assistance available for those dealing with difficulties, the social divide and inequality that pushes poor and rich characters in Gotham further away from any semblance of decency, and the victimization of people who don’t fit into the specific spaces defined by society. 

In the middle of all of the confusing contemplations and supposed insightfulness is one of the most famous comic villains of all time. And while comic book films have found ways to incorporate complex moral stories about characters struggling with their motivation or responsibility, “Joker” never seems to make a clear choice about what kind of character it wants to compose. 

Arthur is suffering, his nervous laugh seemingly teetering from complete sadness to utter contempt in moments, yet the moral struggle ends with the laugh. The world around Arthur is crumbling, the city of Gotham is at a boiling point, anarchy and chaos are imminent and Arthur’s personal emotional frustration and outbursts with and without clown makeup are exploited by the media which eventually points to him as some kind of poster child for Gotham’s frustration. It’s never completely identified because Arthur’s character is never composed to connect his disturbing actions to the turmoil found in the world he exists in. And even if the design of the story was to connect Joker’s origin as bred from chaos, to connect that Joker would exist in some way because society predicated the design, there isn’t enough in the narrative to make these ideas have the strength to become meaningful and astute. Instead, it feels lost, shallow, and misguided. 

Still, amidst the narrative issues, the film boasts a stunning performance from Joaquin Phoenix. The actor composes a character with physical actions that combine bodily contortions; the actor is frail and manipulates his face and body in rigid manners, while also embodying a delicateness, seen within graceful dance moments and gentle hand gestures that move with a fluid-like feel. Robert De Niro is also interesting here, poised in a position as a late-night talk show host that feels similar to Jerry Lewis’ role in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy”, a film where De Niro played the role of an obsessed lurker. 

“Joker” unfortunately never has a target in mind, which ultimately makes all of the moves it takes predictable and somewhat derivative of other films that handle a similar subject matter. The film understands how to photograph a world in distress, how to compose a score that feels ominous and anxious, but it never provides the narrative material for the astonishing abilities of Joaquin Phoenix’s character, and impressive complicated laugh, to have the gravity and depth it craves. 

Monte’s Rating

2.75 out of 5.00