Review: Joker (2019)

Joker (2019)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images

Score: 3 out of 5

Before its release, a lot of the discourse surrounding Joker has not been the most pleasant. A big fear in some corners of the internet was that it might inspire some fans to actually imitate its murderous title character, especially given that that vocal legions of some of the internet's more noxious denizens, particularly the incel community (itself also having a reputation for violence and mass shootings), seem to have latched onto the film and its main character from the moment they saw the first trailer. What's more, the shadow of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting in 2012 during a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises hung over this one like a black cloud, especially given that a widespread urban legend about the massacre (supported by some officials but denied by others) claims that the shooter called himself the Joker when he was in police custody and had dyed his hair a reddish orange to look like a clown. To many people, Joker felt like an extremely tasteless film to make in a time when mass shootings and domestic terrorism have become all-too-real threats.

The finished film does nothing to assuage those fears. Joker is a beautifully crafted ode to edgy, antisocial teenage nihilism, one that I can admire from a distance for its technical craftsmanship, its great performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the Clown Prince of Crime, and its lovingly rendered take on Gotham City inspired by the '70s/'80s New York of classic Martin Scorsese movies (especially Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy)... but on a narrative level, it felt completely hollow, a facsimile of those films that missed what made them work in favor of delivering at face value what they satirized. I don't think anybody's gonna watch this movie and shoot up a theater; no, it's too shallow to inspire that kind of passion. I do, however, suspect that it will inspire loads of people to call it the greatest comic book movie ever made, and that posters for it will inevitably hang alongside those of Fight Club and Scarface in dorm rooms and frat houses across the nation, not least because it is, in fact, a very well-made movie on the surface. It just offered nothing for me, except to wonder what people on either side were getting so worked-up about.

The Joker here is reimagined as Arthur Fleck, a party clown and struggling stand-up comedian in Gotham City sometime in the '80s (the films on the marquee at the theater indicate 1981). He has a mental illness that causes him to burst into laughter at inopportune moments, he lives with his mentally ill mother in an apartment, and he idolizes the late-night talk show host Murray Franklin and wants to appear on his show. Through the film, we watch him go on a downward spiral as he's violently assaulted by hooligans, starts carrying a gun, gets abandoned by the mental health system due to funding cuts, develops affections for his neighbor Sophie, loses his job after he accidentally drops his gun on the ground while performing for sick children, and finally, gets attacked on the subway by three yuppies who thought it would be funny, leading him to pull out his gun and shoot them dead. This last incident not only marks the point of no return for Arthur as he plots revenge on everyone who ever wronged him, it also sets off a city on the edge, where many people sympathize with the mysterious man who shot a bunch of rich fat cats and start hailing him, whoever he is, as a hero compared to the snobbish mayoral candidate Thomas Wayne.

I'll say this now: none of this film's problems are the fault of Joaquin Phoenix. In every review I've read, even those who didn't like the film had nothing but kind words to say about Phoenix's performance as Arthur, and honestly, I'm with them. Phoenix keeps the movie in one piece, managing to craft a clearly-defined character out of a man who is pulled in many different directions by the script. He always made it clear what Arthur was about: a man on the edge who had been kicked and beaten down so many times that he has developed a nihilistic hatred of the world and society around him, carrying around a journal filled with his ramblings and the world doing nothing to discredit the suspicions he writes down within it. I wish Phoenix had played this character in a proper Batman movie, since he would've made a great villain for him, one who may not have overshadowed Heath Ledger's iconic take on the Joker in The Dark Knight but who easily would've been in the same ballpark. And while his work on the film's script left a lot to be desired, Todd Phillips was no slouch in the director's chair. Virtually everything about this film is an homage to classic Scorsese specifically and to the '70s "New Hollywood" era of filmmaking in general, lovingly recreating the gritty streets (this was filmed in New York, Jersey City, and Newark) and atmosphere of urban decay and political turmoil that characterized the era and its crime dramas. Looking at any frame of this film, I could buy it as what we might have gotten if Scorsese himself had directed a Batman movie back then. The grit was more than just surface-level; it pulled me deep into Arthur's transformation into the Joker, dropping me right there into that world with him and making me feel the same pressures that pushed him over the edge. As much as I sharply disagree with this film's message and worldview, I can still honestly say that, for somebody who already buys into it or was ready to, this film does a great job of delivering that message and conveying that worldview.

Which is where I get to the problem that ultimately kneecapped this movie for me. It is clearly inspired by any number of movies about an average Joe who gets pushed over the edge by society, particularly Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Joel Schumacher's Falling Down, but in one critical way, it diverges from them. The thing is, people watching those movies were not meant to cheer for Travis Bickle or William Foster. Yes, their lives sucked, and yes, society did bear some of the blame for turning them into monsters. But that's the thing: they were monsters. Their actions were never portrayed as justified; tragic, yes, but in the end, they were murdering people who had nothing to do with their current predicament, lashing out mindlessly and contributing to the very problems that they hoped to solve rather than actually taking steps to sort things out. They made the final decision to pull the trigger, and their own personal failings were as much to blame for leading them down that road as anything. Falling Down spelled this out most explicitly through the character of Prendergast, a man who the film routinely compares to Foster but who is far more well-adjusted, and knows how to just brush off the petty annoyances in life like dirt on his shoulder. Even though all of these characters have their own misguided fans who root for them, the actual text of their stories paints them not as heroes, but as tragic villains.

Not so with this film. Here, Arthur Fleck is portrayed unambiguously as the hero the audience is supposed to root for.

Every problem of Arthur's is beyond his control. His mental illness was something he was born with, and which went untreated by a dysfunctional health care system. He gets unjustly shit on by everybody around him, from his boss to random passersby. He is a man who is given good reason to believe that nothing will ever work out right for him, and so when he shoots three assholes on the subway, it is cathartic for both him and the audience, a key moment of character growth. What's more, his actions expose an undercurrent of similar rage among countless Gothamites who are also fed up with the world, who start dressing up as clowns as a countercultural symbol and protesting the powerful billionaire Thomas Wayne who's running for mayor. I'm not gonna say that it's a two-hour "we live in a society" meme, not because the comparison isn't accurate (it is) but because others have long since beaten me to it, so instead, I'll use a cooler comparison: the Eminem song "The Real Slim Shady", about how, deep down, everybody has dark urges and an anti-social streak just like the sociopathic "Slim Shady" character that Eminem plays in his songs. The difference is that Eminem always knew it was fantasy and made that perfectly clear. Sure, Slim Shady was an escapist character, but we were not supposed to do the awful things that he does, a point best reflected in another great song from that same album, "Stan". What's more, Eminem was not afraid to point the finger at himself and the pop culture machine he was part of, with one verse on "The Real Slim Shady" spoofing the Y2K-era comedian Tom Green noting that the messages promoted by mass media probably played a part in raising the generation that was so receptive to his message. ("And that's the message that we deliver to little kids, and expect them not to know what a woman's clitoris is.") Joker, however, expects viewers to buy into its nihilistic worldview as just a fact of life, that the world is rotten to the core and that it needs a guy like the Joker in order to shake things up and remind us of that fact. Unlike with Travis Bickle and William Foster, the other shoe never drops here; while we get allusions to Bruce Wayne one day coming around to become the Joker's arch-nemesis Batman, for this film Bruce is just a little kid whose parents are still alive. The ending sees the Joker lionized by an adoring crowd of fellow rebels against "the system" without a hint of irony, even after everything he's done up to that point.

Buying into this film's worldview, that society is fundamentally broken and that there are secretly large numbers of people all around you who feel the same way but are too afraid of the consequences to rebel, is also the only way that the story makes much sense and comes together. The entire subplot about Arthur inspiring the rise of a populist movement against Gotham City's super-rich felt secondary and largely disconnected from the main story, having little bearing on Arthur's journey except to offer background flavor; the two only come together at the very end. The supporting cast is great, particularly Robert De Niro as a stand-in for '80s Johnny Carson who Arthur lionizes and then grows disillusioned by, but none of them truly felt like characters in their own right, just points in Arthur's journey. Zazie Beetz's Sophie gets this the worst, feeling like she was thrown in just to establish that Arthur, who becomes obsessed with her, is unambiguously straight rather than possibly gay or asexual, as a reading of the film without her presence might otherwise indicate. She is gone from the film after only a few scenes, with little bearing on the plot otherwise. Giving any of these characters some more presence in the story might have gone a long way to adding some depth and nuance to Arthur's grimdark wankfest, establishing Gotham City as more than just a gorgeous retro film set where action took place, but as a city where people lived -- one that truly felt the disruption he unleashed. For as much as Phillips is aping Scorsese here, he missed one of the critical components of Scorsese's films, the manner in which he treated New York itself as a character in its own right. This film did no such thing with Gotham City beyond a few pieces of disconnected world-building here and there. Gotham City may be a dump (literally; the waste management workers are on strike), but it all feels like a movie set or the sandbox world of a Grand Theft Auto ripoff.

The Bottom Line

I have no doubt in my mind that there is an audience for this movie. I'm just not part of it. The craftsmanship that went into it is absolutely impeccable, but it's all in the service of a hollow script that feels like the worst excesses of bad '90s comic books brought to the multiplex. If you're curious, see it; you may like it more than I did. If not, then you're not missing much.