Joker

A fairly packed house at Morley Event cinemas for this Saturday evening screening of Joker. Lots to chew over in this film and it's been fairly beaten around and praised in equal measure, from what I've read. Two people I know were pretty down on it and another really enjoyed it. Me? Kind of in the middle, actually.

The best aspect of the film was the atmosphere, the look, the similarity, in this regard, to films from the American New Wave of the 1970s. There are lots of influences here - Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Blow Out (incidentally seen on a Gotham City cinema marquee, along with Zorro the Gay Blade) and The King of Comedy are just the ones I can think of. The performances are mint, especially Joaquin Phoenix, who is really staking a claim to being the best American actor going around at the moment. His turn in Joker put me in mind of a film he made recently for Lynne Ramsey called You Were Never Really Here. Both films required physical transformations and intense explorations of the characters' mental health. And here's one of the major themes of the film - mental illness. Written in (future Joker) Arthur Fleck's notebook is this:

The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you DON'T.

Fleck has an ailment whereby he laughs uncontrollably. He imagines things happening around him (more of this later). He takes a gun to a children's hospital. And he kills people. In the climactic scene on the talk show, he asks Robert DeNiro's host, Murray Franklin:

What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? I'll tell you what you get! You get what you fucking deserve!

And this feeds into another of the major themes - a society's treatment of its poorer, less stable citizens. This is also where the nihilism ratchets up a few notches. Much of the bad press the film has been getting relates to both of these themes. I can't really comment on the accuracy of the mental illness angle but the anarchy of Gotham seems just a dog whistle away. And I quite liked this film's two fingers up to the establishment, but then I guess I always do.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Back to the imaginings. We see that Fleck imagines himself in the audience of the Murray Franklin show. We know that isn't real. Later, we understand he hasn't been having a relationship with Zazie Beetz's character - a few Sixth Sense style flashbacks illustrate this. But please, don't tell me there are more fakeries. I'm not having it. That's a cop-out. It's too easy for film-makers to make the unreliable narrator a complete bullshit artist and nullify much of what we see in the film. But then again, as has been mentioned to me (Roly's reading), that's part of being immersed in the mental illness stream of the film. I'd still rather read it as most of what we see on film, actually happened - not a dream, hallucination or fudge of some sort.

Some more things to note. The talk show stuff is a direct lift from The King of Comedy, with DeNiro in the Fleck role and Jerry Lewis as the host. It also references Phoenix himself on Letterman during the I'm Still Here phase. I'm not sure the film needed to focus on young Bruce Wayne as much as it did and the retconning of his parent's death to blame the Joker was shite. Oh, and it needed a tighter edit, if only to trim some of those bloody dance scenes. Yes, Phoenix has found some creepy ways to utilise his malnourished frame. No, we don't need that much of it.

So, ultimately, I'd say it was an above average film with some controversial takes on thorny topics. The homage to earlier films was nice and it seems Joe Public is lapping it up as well, so there may well be a sequel of sorts. Something to look forward to?

See also:

A predecessor to Joker, Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982) and for more hard-core Phoenix, Lynne Ramsey's You Were Never Really Here (2017).

SPOILERS IN POD!!!

Listen to "Joker" on Spreaker.