Still not sure if I should give this film one star or five for its gut-punch, but anything in-between would be meaningless. It’s equally repulsive and fascinating. There is something corpse-like about it. You cannot unsee it.
Five-star review of Joker (2019), Lola On Film
It has been two months since writer-director Todd Phillips‘s sequel to his controversial, game-changing Joker (2019) hit the silver screens, and as a reluctant admirer of the original (see quote above), and having heard that Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) may be somewhat catastrophic, I did stay away from watching it, until the dust settled. It wouldn’t necessarily play as a negative in my contrarian mind this string of severe feedback on a film, as the best cinema often needs some time to pass for the audience to catch up to its specific ingenuity. Sadly, with Folie à Deux, this will hardly be the case. Nevertheless, it might still become a filmmaking template on how not to destroy a good story.
The concoction in question (and an indigestible concoction it is) hit my HBO Go, and being served it, I opened up to the possibility of at least ironically enjoying it, until about twenty minutes in, when I began pitying it. Not hating it, not being angry at it, certainly not despising it, just feeling sorry for it, watching the immense talent on display slowly being crushed into an ill-fitting concept, while fragments of a difficult, compelling tale lie strewn on the floor, as if in a bloody Gotham City crime scene, waiting for a forensic examination of its disemboweled narrative.
Joker 2 killed Joker 1 in a knife fight (spoiler alert), and that’s a fact.
The stifling and paradoxically chosen concept in question, one of a jukebox musical, presents itself almost as second thought, a form that surely must have been chosen after the sequel’s casting process, since the added ingredient, and one of the two film’s leads, is the undoubtedly gifted Lady Gaga, an iconic singer, with pretty decent acting chops, passionately inhabiting the Joker’s mate in DC Comics lore — Lee Quinzel aka Harley Quinn. So why not showcase all that incredible musical potential (I assume the filmmakers debated), and make the central characters’ narcissistic fantasy of omnipotence more La La Land and less viscerally upsetting?
In any case, Ms Quinzel, disturbed and determined, comes to the rescue of the imprisoned Arthur Fleck, the eponymous Joker, locked up after his murderous spree (from Joker 1), in which he shot a sneering talk-show host on live television, and also murdered several of his casual tormentors, whom we meet during the course of the original film — which include, most importantly, his terrifying mother. When Arthur snaps, during a particularly gruesome attack in the subway, he begins his metamorphosis from a meek, lonely, friendless, partnerless, traumatised party clown (tragically lacking a sense of humour), with a history of extremely distressing childhood abuse, and a hysterical inappropriate cackle — into the smooth, macabre, supremely self-confident avenging dark angel of the shunned and the fallen, a staple of the DC Comics universe — the very own folk-hero villain of the rotting metropolis. His face painted in what seems to be forced Cubism clown makeup, behind him a sprawling army of copy-cat Jokers, hanging on his every word and deed, causing mayhem in the city that once treated him with indifference and disdain.
The united pathology of the borderline Ms Quinzel’s fandom, conjugally joined with her murderous idol behind bars, fibbing her way into the heart of the lovelorn, most likely virginal Arthur, obsessively demanding that he amp up his psychotic bravado, in truth, presents a promising narrative premise. Full of psycho-thriller potential, plumbing the sewer realms of pop celebrity culture. Yet, transgressing various forms across several genres, Folie à Deux becomes so meta, it vomits this precious and poisonous kernel of an excellent idea alongside a metaphorical slush of myriad unprocessed elements, disconnected and messy, with only glimpses of a story that might have been.
It is in its precious moments of genuine pathos, such as was Arthur’s courtroom re-living of years of his mothers’ abuse and belittling, that made me realise, yet again, just how incredible Joaquin Phoenix is as the nihilistic disintegrated dystopian messenger of chaos, how well he is able to convey the unbearable pain at the root of Joker’s personality switch, which, in turn, is the main question of the entire trial proceedings (is he, or is he not, insane?).
Essentially, Folie à Deux is a failed musical courtroom melodrama, whose bloated agenda betrayed Phoenix’s singular creation, a living entity of its own, haunting the popular mythos, which is possibly the worst thing storytellers can do.
Equally, Hildur Guðnadóttir sophisticatedly sinister score and Lawrence Sher‘s stellar darkly engaging cinematography still stand, perfectly, despite the usurped narrative, evoking the dirty neon vibe of murky 1980s city streets and dwellings with precision, while the production design (Mark Friedberg) offers the musical numbers a jaded nightclub tone, with sickly saturated colours and lusterless spotlights — the mirthless canned laughter of Lee and Arthur’s fantasy fake audiences more of a nightmare than a daydream.
Just like the cartoon Joker, with which the film begins, Folie à Deux battles its own shadow, unsuccessfully.
Written by Scott Silver and Todd Phillips, himself, the script, and its direction, presents a proverbial series of wrong turns that end in disaster, its plot disorientated and its twists derailed, its protagonist pushed into a blind alley, a place where all anti-heroes know full well they end up only to die.
★☆☆☆☆
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 