I tend to avoid movie remakes, but the Hollywood weasels have gone and sneaked one by me. They remade Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but they mashed ’em together and “reimagined” the lead character as The Joker in the days when he finally snapped. Then they delivered it as an extra-gritty R-rated comic book movie (which are all the rage these days, I hear).
Okay, there’s a little more to it than that, but I’m not sure that it’s enough. There’s a message here about how society creates its own monsters. We marginalize the mentally ill and sometimes in blows up in our face, often in the form of sudden, horrible violence. And it keeps happening. It will likely always happen. Because we never learn from it. Because we don’t want to deal with it. A mentally ill person is like a pile of shit on the sidewalk. No one wants to clean it up or get near it or think about it. Instead, we do our best to steer clear.
Maybe we ostracize these people or give them a beating sometimes–and then we’re surprised when that doesn’t work.
More bad news: The movie business is in such a sorry state right now that probably the only way that a film like this could get made and reach an audience is in the guise of a comic book movie. And you can only blame “the people” so much for this. In 2019, we live in a media blizzard. Sometimes I want to hang in and watch a movie and then it takes me fifteen hours of scrolling through multiple streaming platforms to decide on one. Movies get submerged quickly. Nothing plays for months and years like back in the day. The arthouse is dead. If you want to make that edgy drama that gets the world talking, you might need to squeeze Batman in there so that anyone will notice.
I have mixed feelings about Joker. Walking out of the theater, I mostly didn’t like it. My big turn-off was that I felt that co-writer/director Todd Phillips leaned way too much into his Scorsese fixation. This film is not mere homage. No, Phillips is down on his knees in worship. He’s dead-set on reminding of you of good ol’ Marty whenever he can, up to and including the sledgehammer, yuk-yuk casting of Rupert Pupkin himself (Robert DeNiro) as a TV talk show host (or miscasting him, rather; DeNiro is weirdly awkward in the part). Phillips does everything but license “Gimme Shelter”.
Even its evocation of the old fleapit New York City circa 1981 turned me off (because that’s another Scorsese thing, another swipe), even though it’s very well done.
Yes, the official setting here is “Gotham City”, but in this film, at least, Gotham is Travis Bickle’s New York, no question. It’s all trashed-out streets and deadly subways and garbage collector strikes and shabby inner city apartments with wheezing elevators and paint peeling everywhere. They’re the kind of streets that will ignore your pain because everyone else is in pain, too.
Our anti-hero here is one Arthur Fleck, an awkward, emaciated mental case who works as a clown-for-hire and just barely keeps the horrors in his head at bay with medications provided by a publically funded city program that’s just about to be cut off. He lives with his mother (who’s not exactly a picture of sanity, either), makes people uncomfortable, thinks that he might have a future as a comedian and the first time we see him is when some kids beat the shit out of him while he’s on the job in his clown get-up and holding up advertising on the sidewalk.
Joaquin Phoenix in the lead part gives a whale of a performance. He’s not the ultimate villain, nor is he the scenery chewer of the year. Phoenix instead is a broken person. Behind every horrible thing he does is a nightmare world of his own suffering.
The most inspired move that Todd Phillips makes is that he frames the entire film from Fleck’s cracked point of view. Phoenix is in every scene. We never hear what people say about him when he leaves the room. We see what he sees, hear what he hears and get sucked into his fantasies.
This film also solves the problem of how the hell do you top Heath Ledger’s Joker? The solution: Approach the character from a different angle. Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger’s Joker was a mystery man who told lies about his background. He was chaos personified. No past. Probably no future, either.
By contrast, this film’s Joker is exposed to us in excruciating detail. He’s never a mystery. Even his delusions are mostly obvious.
The Joker has become one of those prestige roles for actors to play. Part of the appeal is that he’s always the most magnetic thing about the Batman movies. He upstages the hero every time.
Jack Nicholson gets to go nuts while Michael Keaton is stuck brooding.
Heath Ledger gets to be an electric embodiment of total anarchy while Christian Bale has to put on a death-metal voice and pine for Maggie Gylenhaal.
The less said about Jared Leto’s Joker the better, though he gets beat up more than he deserves. Leto didn’t write or direct that Suicide Squad piece a’ shit. If you hated it, blame those people. Shoot the puppeteer, not the puppet. (Granted though, Leto and his penchant for sending used condoms and dead rats to his castmates in a fit of “method actor” assholism sounds like someone any director would rather not hire, even if he has a stupid Best Supporting Actor Oscar.)
But I digress.
This film scratches an itch. How about we finally give The Joker his own movie and leave this Bat jerk-off out of it? (Yes, Bruce Wayne does show up here, but he’s a little kid. The Joker here is AT LEAST twenty-five years older, maybe even thirty-five years older, which is perfect. As eventual arch-enemies in this world, their differences are also generational.)
I don’t hate this movie, but my barrier to actually LIKING it is because Todd Phillips comes off like a fake maverick. He earned his Hollywood big shot card as the director of blockbuster comedies that I’ve never seen. Now, he seeks credibility as a dramatic director, but does so with broad strokes.
Is Phillips excorcising a demon or merely imitating another director’s moves?
He’s so studied in those moves that this is a serious question.
Phillips knows his Scorsese classics inside and out, I bet, but what I think he misses is that they stand as products of their time. They were white hot and relevant. They were dangerous because they directly addressed the world happening outside your window. By contrast, Phillips here goes for a retro vision. He wants to live in those old movies. He’s too removed to know anything about what’s happening on the streets in 2019.
My real test for Todd Phillips though might be whether or not he gives in and makes another one.
This film doesn’t set up a sequel at all–because we already know what comes next after The Joker gets in touch with his true psychotic self and Bruce Wayne grows up and gets comfortable behind a mask and under a cape. Our imagination can fill in the rest. Joker even closes with a classic “The End” title card. We haven’t seen THAT in awhile.
However, this film is such a hit that, as I write this on a quiet November night, the scent of Thanksgiving in the air, this film still playing in theaters, notes for a follow-up are surely being passed around the Warner Brothers offices with the ferocity of hurricane winds.
“How do we keep this going?”
“Are there more movies from this Marvin Scorsese guy that we can steal from?”
“How about a gritty take on The Penguin? We’ll call it Raging Penguin!”
Don’t do any of that shit, Todd Phillips! You wanna be Scorsese? Then BE SCORSESE.
Don’t make a sequel. Move on to other stories and other characters and, through them, keep showing us how we’re all fucked. up.
You deserve it and we deserve it.