Thoughts on "Joker" (2019)

One week out from the opening of Joker, the Todd Philips-directed film depicting the origin of the infamous comic book villain, the United States army was put on high alert over concerns that the film’s opening could prompt violence.

It was the culmination of several months of controversies that surrounded the film, and it was the deciding factor that prompted me to wait nearly three weeks before finally seeing the film.

But what guarantee was this of my safety? Even as I watched the movie, was I not also watching my audience?

Joker obviously pushed buttons for critics and audiences alike. Some viewers lauded the film’s boundary-pushing narrative and conventions, and rightfully praised Joaquin Phoenix’s central performance as the troubled Arthur Fleck who becomes the titular Clown Prince of Crime.

Other viewers were quick to label the movie nothing short of a public menace; a movie which justified the mindset of countless loners who saw in the Joker a kindred spirit and whose own warped actions could led to copycat crimes.

And, for a lot of Joker I was willing to give the movie the benefit of doubt.

The acting was phenomenal and Phoenix is, understandably, an Oscar front-running for his evocative and nuanced performance.

The cinematography was breathtaking, rendering the film’s version of Gotham City more modern hellscape than bustling metropolis.

The score was riveting; each chord of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting string score felt as if it were born from the same pit of despair out of which Phoenix’s Joker crawled, and it was complimented by some truly stunning needle drops that ran the gambit from Frank Sinatra to Garry Glitter.

On a visual and aural level, Joker succeeded brilliantly, but its script – penned by Philips and Scott Silver – was shallow and unfocused, practically copying and pasting some of its most visceral moments and images from the films that Philips insisted Joker was paying homage to.

It is clear that Joker owes much to the early works of Martin Scorsese; this supervillain epic feeling like the outrageous result of combining Taxi Driver (1976) with The King of Comedy (1983), both of which starred Robert De Niro who, in Joker, plays the late-night comedian with whom Fleck is obsessed.

In doing so, Joker tries to lift the mirror to the audience watching it and show us the murderous clown reflected in it, but did nothing to comment upon that image.

Joker does nothing to invalidate the Joker’s reign of terror – if anything it justifies the warped worldview perpetuated by lone wolf terrorists who insist that they were somehow hurt by society at large.

Joker wants to be a tale of moral ambiguity like its gritty predecessors, but Philips cannot handle the volatile material that he has crafted with the same skill and steady hand that Scorsese displayed over 40 years ago, and the film is painted in stark blacks and white with not a single shade of grey in sight.

On a narrative level too, the film is not sure what it wants to be; its moments of cold-blooded drama vying for attention with plot threads which attempt to attach the movie to the larger, extended universe of the Batman comics and though the Caped Crusader is nowhere to be seen in this particular origin story, anyone with a passing familiarity with the Batman mythos is liable to feel just as pulled out of the film as I was.

Joker does not fail entirely, but its merits are overshadowed by its obvious drawbacks. Joaquin Phoenix’s excellent performance is unfortunately lost amidst the film’s patently dangerous rhetoric and any film that does not take care to explore controversies like these with careful baby steps, but instead elects to dance down the whole staircase is highly suspect.