Joker: Folie à Deux
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
Five years ago, Todd Philips made a dangerous film, a comic book movie through a fractured Scorsese viewfinder that cried with the clown the world said was not funny. Cleverly bitter, it was an excellent retooling of Scorsese’s violently alienated loner. But mainly it was a stage for the unerring brilliance of Joaquin Phoenix.
Phillips’s sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux (which means “delusion or mental illness shared by two people”) revisits poor Arthur Fleck shortly before he stands trial for murdering five people, including late night talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro).
Fleck is a shell of his former self. No jokes, no laughter. Until prison guard Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) gets Arthur included in a singing class over in the minimum-security ward, where Arthur meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga).
And suddenly, Arthur has a song in his heart.
Phoenix continues to be so good he’s worrisome. Gaga delivers on nearly the same level—which is unheard of—and her spark is sorely missed when she’s not onscreen. Philips flanks the couple with two of the business’s best, Catherine Keener as Arthur’s lawyer and Gleeson, whose brutish jocularity is alarmingly authentic.
Where Phillips found the tone for his alienated white man in Scorsese, his love story takes on the fantastical theatricality of a musical. It’s a choice that works better in theory than execution, mainly because the sequel is almost entirely confined to prison and courtroom drama. The pace is leaden, the grim brutality repetitive. Where the first film used a half dozen or so profoundly human scenes to break your heart, the sequel fetishizes Arthur’s misery to the point of sadism.
Phillips surrounds the terrific ensemble (which includes another memorable turn from Leigh Gill) with several well-staged set pieces, but the ambition of this new vision soon finds itself battling curiosity and tedium.
Phoenix and Gaga make a truly electric pair, but as the courtroom scenes drag on its not hard to side with Lee’s impatience at the strategy in play. What begins as a relevant comment on the blurring of realities descends into a self indulgence that seems to find Phillips still taking on critics of his first Joker film.
The clear Scorsese moments amid all the musical numbers are an appropriate reminder of how the film can’t quite bring its ambitions of mold-breaking to fruition. And as it leaves behind a slightly open door, Folie à Deux exits the stage as a dark, frustrating exercise, as capable of painful beauty as it is of clowning around.
