Mark Reviews Movies: JOKER (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 3, 2019

The smartest and most troubling part of Joker is how director Todd Phillips and Scott Silver's screenplay strips all of the usual comic book trappings from this origin story of arguably the most famous comic book villain. There are no outlandish gadgets, no diabolical schemes, no city- or world-destroying threats, and, most notably, no hero waiting in a cave or atop some roof to save the day.

Here, the villain, who's the protagonist of this tale, just has a pistol. The story revolves around the mounting anger of a madman, while the resentment of a city, which has had enough with the haves trampling upon and insulting the have-nots, rises to the surface in the backdrop. As for heroes, there aren't any. There are a bunch of useless public servants, who either don't care about those in trouble or would rather spend the taxpayers' money on something else, and equally ineffectual cops, who can't even catch an emaciated guy in clown makeup while he's dancing on a long stairway.

This film doesn't want the comic book stuff, although, obviously, it has to possess it to some degree. It lives with the man who will become the Clown Prince of Crime, the archnemesis of Batman, who's still just a rich kid living in a stately manor at this time.

For most of the story, the future Joker is just poor, mentally ill Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), until the character's climactic, very public announcement of his new identity. He lives in a world that looks and feels very much like New York City of the late 1970s, but of course, because this is a specific comic book world (that likely will fit somewhere in some future installments of a cinematic universe), it's actually Gotham City in the early 1980s.

This dichotomy—of the intentionally fictional transformed into the seemingly real—is where things get a bit tricky with the film. Phillips and Silver may be playing within a mythology of the comics, but they're also playing with reality—raising broad issues, such as mental health and economic insecurity, but also alluding to some specifics, such as how Arthur's first taste of murder mirrors the case of Bernhard Goetz. It's pretty obvious that the filmmakers really don't care about any of these things, except in the way that we'll recognize them enough to see this as more than just another comic book movie.

The superficial trappings of the comics have been replaced with a superficial sense of reality. How to react to this film, then, is really a battle.

Can we just accept it as another comic book origin story, despite Phillips' attempts to bring real-world relevance to the material? Can we ignore how shallow the story's real-world connections are? Can we accept that superficiality is just going be part of such stories? If we can, is a rather drastic shift in look, tone, and approach enough of a reason to overlook this film's considerable shortcomings as a kind of social parable? Maybe the fact that this film raises these questions and many more is enough reason to consider that Phillips' gamble has paid off in some way.

This is mostly a character piece—not a study, because we know from the title, the comics and other movies, and the first act exactly who this character is and will become. Arthur, who was recently released from a state psychiatric facility and has to check in with an inattentive social worker every week, lives with his mother Penny (Frances Conroy). While he dreams of becoming a standup comedian and making it big like his talk-show-host idol Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), Arthur works as a clown for hire. He also has a medical condition, which makes him laugh uncontrollably in times of stress.

Basically, everything goes wrong. A gang of kids beat him in an alleyway. A co-worker gives him a pistol for protection. Arthur brings that gun everywhere, and as a result, he's soon fired. A budget cut to social services means he won't be able to get his medication.

Things turn around, though, when Arthur murders three young rich kids, who harass a woman and then taunt him, on the subway. That gives him a bit of self-confidence—enough to woo neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and try to achieve his professional dream.

The narrative beats of this are obvious (including a third-act twist about Arthur's social life that's basically telegraphed the moment it's set in motion). That's kind of a given, though, especially since the story eventually brings the Waynes—Thomas (Brett Cullen), making a run for mayor, and young Bruce (Dante Pereira-Olson), unaware of a forthcoming rendezvous with tragedy—into the picture. Again, this is definitely a comic book story, which makes the film's real-world aspirations both easier to digest and frustrating for one reason: They really don't matter.

What does matter here is the tone—dreary, angry, filled with an enfolding sense of dread—which mostly frames Arthur's descent into villainy as a horrific inevitability. As important is Phoenix's performance, which is terrifying in its physicality (We can see the actor's bones jutting as his body contorts, almost as if it's rebelling against or getting in sync with the twisted mind controlling it) and discomforting in how subdued he plays a character who usually is anything but that.

The idea of Joker serving as some kind of allegory to real-life issues certainly doesn't pay off to the extent that Phillips seems to believe it does. Even so, the film is different from what we might expect of a supervillain origin story and what we've come to accept as the norm for comic book movies. In this age of superhero saturation, different is refreshing and daring enough.

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