At the beginning of “Joker,” Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), seated in front of a mirror, hooks a finger into each corner of his mouth, and pulls. Up, then down: a grin, a grimace. We are meant to think of the masks, comic and tragic, that were worn by the actors in ancient Greek drama. Over the next couple of hours, those two moods will be welded together, until we can’t tell the light from the dark.
Arthur is a clown, and a would-be comic, but he’s really not funny at all. So badly does he bomb at a comedy club that footage of his set is replayed on television. That’s the joke. He lives in Gotham City, which, as everybody knows, equals New York City minus the peace and the pastoral bliss. The year, by my reckoning, is 1981, since “Blow Out” and “Zorro: The Gay Blade” are advertised on cinema marquees. Other highlights include a garbage strike. Arthur works for a clown agency, and one of his jobs is to stand on the street in a red nose and a green wig, holding a promotional sign for a local store. When some kids grab the sign, he gives chase, his enormous shoes clomping on the sidewalk. Another clown lends him a gun, for safety’s sake, but it drops out of Arthur’s costume, clattering to the floor, while he’s entertaining children in a hospital ward and singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” A tough gig for Arthur, who says, “I haven’t been happy one minute of my entire fucking life.”
And there you have it. “Joker” is a miserabilist manifesto. It’s directed by Todd Phillips, who co-wrote it with Scott Silver, and whose previous films, from “Road Trip” (2000) and “Old School” (2003) to the “Hangover” triptych, have delighted in the imperishable idiocy of the American male, and in his stubborn plans to dodge the draft of adulthood. Arthur Fleck, you might say, represents a nasty new twist on this theme. He still shares an apartment with his aging mother, Penny (Frances Conroy); their relationship is close but tense—he washes her hair while she takes a bath—and he must search for confidants elsewhere. As well as befriending, or imagining that he has befriended, a single mother (Zazie Beetz) who lives in his building, he meets with a social worker (Sharon Washington), appointed by the city, who monitors his medication. We learn from her that Arthur has been institutionalized in the past, and he carries a card that he shows to people when they flinch away from him. It reads “Forgive my laughter: I have a condition.”
But what condition? Could it be pseudobulbar affect, which is neurological in origin and gives rise to uncontained laughing and crying? Under stress, Arthur certainly breaks into a hyena’s cackle, which stops as abruptly as it starts; he also weeps, and, in closeup, we follow the tracks of the tears on his clown’s white-painted face. (I haven’t seen such artful drips since 1971, when Dirk Bogarde’s hair dye melted, along with his soul, at the end of “Death in Venice.”) The film, however, takes no serious interest in what might be wrong with Arthur. It merely invites us to watch his wrongness grow out of control and swell into violence, and proposes a vague connection between that private swelling and a wider social malady. “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” he asks. Guess what: it’s both!
“Joker” is not plotted so much as crammed with mangy incidents. Like animals, they come in two by two. By a charming coincidence, for example, two major scenes take place in public toilets. There are also two extended subway sequences: one in which Arthur uses his gun for the first time, and another in which, pursued by police, he ducks in and out of the carriages, as if in homage to “The French Connection” (1971). Most important of all, we get two father figures. One is Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), the host of a TV talk show, under whose wing Arthur dreams of finding shelter and approval. The other is Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a wealthy brute who is running for mayor of Gotham. (He has a young son named Bruce. Get it?) Thirty years ago, Penny Fleck worked for him, and Arthur hopes to exploit that distant link, though Wayne has nothing but scorn for the Flecks of this fragmented world. “Those of us who have made something of our lives will always look at those who haven’t,” he declares, “and see nothing but clowns.”
Trailing clouds of controversy, “Joker” descends upon us. The online discussion has mounted from the rampant to the manic, undeterred, or perhaps exacerbated, by the fact that nobody, apart from critics and festivalgoers, has actually seen the movie. (Emotions run high when people are low on facts.) In one corner are those who crave a masterpiece: a film that will unearth a new psychic intensity in the domain of the comic book, ideal for our distended times. In the opposite corner are those who fear that Phillips and Phoenix may give license to all the lonely people out there—in particular, to any messed-up white guys who feel wretchedly uncherished and would welcome a tutorial in the art of lashing out.
What is agreed upon, among those who have seen “Joker,” is the prowess with which Phoenix holds it all together. His face may get the greasepaint, but it’s his whole body, coiled upon itself like a spring of flesh, from which the movie’s energy is released. He’s so thin that, when he strips to the waist and bends, his spine and shoulder blades jut out from the skin; is he a fallen angel, with his wings chopped off, or a skeleton-in-waiting, halfway to the grave? Francis Bacon, I think, would have stared at Arthur with a hungry eye.
The trouble is that Phillips, too, is in thrall to his hero, unable to avert his gaze, or his camera, from the lurid spectacle. The same was true, you could argue, of earlier Jokers—Jack Nicholson, in “Batman” (1989), or Heath Ledger, in “The Dark Knight” (2008), whose features cracked in tandem with his mind. But those were supporting roles, whereas Arthur is the main attraction. No longer is he forced to be part of the scenery; he is the scenery, and such is the strenuous effort of Phoenix’s performance that it becomes exhausting to behold. Get a load of me, he seems to say, and the load is almost too much to bear. Now and then, other actors, less worked up, pass across the stage: Bill Camp as a detective, for example, or Brian Tyree Henry as a hospital clerk, both wonderfully weary, like visitors from Planet Normal. I must admit, they come as a relief.
Here’s the deal. “Joker” is not a great leap forward, or a deep dive into our collective unconscious, let alone a work of art. It’s a product. All the pre-launch rumblings, the rants and the raves, testify to a cunning provocation, and, if we yield to it, we’re not joining a debate; we’re offering our services, unpaid, to the marketing department at Warner Bros. When Dalí and Buñuel made “L’Âge d’Or” (1930), they wanted to start a riot, and they succeeded, but “Joker” yearns for little more than a hundred op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets. With ticket sales, naturally, to match.
The evidence for this daring scheme is everywhere you look, in Phillips’s film, and everywhere you listen. Nicholson’s Joker may have danced and pranced to the sound of Prince’s “Partyman,” but Phoenix gyrates, on a steep flight of steps, to “Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2,” a 1972 hit by Gary Glitter. It used to be popular with sports teams, rousing the crowds at N.F.L. and N.H.L. games, before Glitter was convicted, in 1999, of possessing child pornography, and, seven years later, of sexually abusing minors, in Vietnam. Since then, understandably, the song has tumbled out of favor. Do you believe that the decision to revive it, for “Joker,” is anything but a studied choice, nicely crafted to offend? Please. I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade, but I realize, equally, that to vent any inordinate wrath toward it is to fall straight into its trap, for outrage merely proves that our attention has been snagged. Just ask the President of the United States.
“Joker” has its own political poise. Lest it be accused of right-wing inflammation, allowance is made for issues more congenial to the left. Cuts to welfare, we are told, will soon block Arthur’s access to therapy and medication, and the movie’s plea for the downtrodden to be given their rightful say harks back to Frank Capra and Chaplin. In one bizarre scene, the nabobs of Gotham, in tuxedos and gowns, are even treated to a special screening of “Modern Times.” Why should Phillips nod to a film of 1936, if not to stake his claim as a legatee? No less brazen are the references to Scorsese, and to his probing of urban paranoia—in “Taxi Driver” (1976) and again in “The King of Comedy” (1982), where De Niro played a reckless proto-Arthur, fixated on a talk-show host.
“Joker” peaks in chaos and conflagration, ignited by Arthur’s crimes. Earlier, he slew three fellows in suits on the grimy subway: a fell deed that was taken by the have-nots as a call to arms against the haves. Now the city swarms with a mob of the frustrated, all sporting Joker masks and wreaking indiscriminate revenge. Arthur smiles indulgently upon them, like a wolf surveying its pups, then climbs onto the hood of a smashed vehicle and glories in the applause. (You can sense the movie congratulating itself.) We’re not far from the flaming climax of “White Heat” (1949)—another Warner Bros. shocker, with James Cagney as, yes, a mother-stricken murderer named Arthur, beset by psychiatric problems and laughing his way to perdition. Back then, the Times was dismayed: “Let us soberly warn that ‘White Heat’ is also a cruelly vicious film and that its impact upon the emotions of the unstable or impressionable is incalculable.” No such worries for Phillips’s movie; its impact is solemnly calculated to the final inch. I was expecting something called “Joker” to be fun. More fool me. ♦
