Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019)
✭✭✭✩✩
In the early moments of Peter Weir’s cult-classic The Truman Show (1998), its title character (played by Jim Carrey) is leafing through a photo album, reluctantly, when he discovers a picture of himself as a young child. “Little angel … Oh, my little clown,” speaks his mother, implicitly persuading Truman to uphold the fantasy of his existence. To a beady-eyed audience, he is an easily digested prospect for entertainment – ‘my little clown’, unknowingly, for a generation of television viewers; to himself, however, he is no playful, comic entertainer. Loneliness and confusion pervade: “You never had a camera in my head!” he resolutely declares.
In various ways does Todd Phillips’ Joker resemble the dynamics of such an existence – not least for how easily such a façade is peeled away, a consciousness that unfolds with the development of narrative. Sweeping the Venice film festival in August, where it received an eight-minute standing ovation, the picture has since provoked a momentous surge of backlash: tallying words such as “toxic”, “uncomfortable [viewing]” and “cynical” (more or less from people who haven’t watched the film). It is an exhilarating prospect when a contemporary film generates this kind of reputation before even having had a general release.
Joker loosely exists in orbit of the DC universe – we glimpse the Wayne family, as well as suggestions of other cultural phenomena – but, fundamentally, it is a character study in psychopathy, clothed in the comic-book tradition. To be surprised by its personality is a naivety on the part of the audience; it is an origins story that holds no pretensions of being anything else. For anyone paying to watch a tragedy, how could you expect not to be shocked? Phillips’ comic figure – seized fervently by the capable hands of Joaquin Phoenix – emerges not as a product of the world (much like Heath Ledger’s portrait in The Dark Knight (2008) instalment) but rather as a pedestrian of it, who by virtue of dressing as a clown is borne into a reactionary wave of anti-capitalist agenda. Not prompted to think any differently, the Joker trades a life of psychosomatic disorder for the effortless “comedy” of killing: “… for my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do, and people are starting to notice.” It is all too natural to be a clown in this society.
In a Harlem/Brooklyn-inspired Gotham city, Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) works as a professional clown for a living – twirling signs on street corners and dancing for children in hospital – whilst also caring for his aged, bed-ridden mother, Penny. Fleck suffers from a pseudobulbar affect, a neurological condition of involuntarily bursting into laughter; treatment is presented, in the form of counselling, medication and a thought diary, but nothing appears to work (“I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore”). Not unlike the 1920s paintings of Pierrot the clown, by Pablo Picasso, outward happiness is used to colour a complex, inward melancholy, only here the paint runs … even if it is regularly made up. Gotham is alive with societal corruption, witnessed in the beatings and offense inflicted upon Fleck himself – no one could be defeated more. Chance brings about a new beginning with the screening of his botched stand-up routine on the live Murray Franklin Show, helmed by an enigmatic Robert De Niro, and so does a new chapter unfold.
Todd Phillips – previously locked into frat-boy comedies such as The Hangover Trilogy (2009 – 2013) and Due Date (2010) – engineers a pretence of seriousness over levity, closely alluding to the works of Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet (although falling short of both, equally) when finding the tones and locality of his urban, American landscape. It is an homage channelled only superficially, the touchstones of Taxi Driver (1976) or The King of Comedy (1983) – the former gestured twice with a mock-finger headshot – compromised by the pseudo-serious, shallow depths of its script. Phillips’ does not engage his inspiration originally or tactfully (although a Rupert Pupkin-esque performance by De Niro is dazzling alone). Surfaces are important to the grammar of this picture – whether internally or externally.
Joaquin Phoenix introduces a uniquely upsetting performance of the infamous character, most notably during his bouts of laughter – all of which are followed by an equally strained intake of breath, attempting to avoid eye contact as he fumbles for an explanatory medical card. Far removed from the pantomime antics of Jack Nicholson’s 1989 rendition, Joker works somewhere between Jared Leto’s overt conceit in Suicide Squad (2016) and Heath Ledger’s spiritual damage from 2008. Once again it still cannot compare to the latter, but it is a masterful attempt. Phoenix elevates a hastily-drawn stereotype into moments of spectacle, in particular with dance – as observed in the bathroom; descending the concrete staircase; or before entering the stage. Such moments of carefully worked bliss are also indicative of control, the mind and body settled, if temporarily, as they are married to the high-sounding beat of Gary Glitter or the disturbed, throbbing cello of Hildur Guðnadóttir. I am reminded of the classical soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) – “now it was lovely music that came into my aid […] and I viddied right at once what to do” – otherwise a thematic extension to the acts of violence and rape perpetuated throughout.
Arthur Fleck, or the “Joker” (his title assumed with renewed purpose), is a deliberately tragic figure not a comic one – as pointed by Mark Kermode in a recent interview, a line is clearly drawn here between ‘empathy’ and ‘pity’; Joker is without doubt a pitiable figure. And yet for all its absence of character development, poor depiction of mental illness and homage, the second-half of Joker is a breath-taking plunge into the deepest limits of brutality and moral anarchy. It is by no means a dangerous film but it is certainly provocative, and for those unused to comic-books reflecting a glimmer of the world of today, many will be afraid to look again. Fierce and unimaginative craftsmanship.
