In The Shallow

My thoughts on Joker: Folie a Deux

In The Shallow

Joker: Folie a Deux is a film that feels like a deliberate and prolonged slap in the face to all of the moviegoers and cultural commentators who deluded themselves into taking the shallow and frankly stupid exercise in corporate-approved nihilism that was the 2019 original far more seriously than it deserved to be. Considering that the previous film pulled in over a billion dollars at the box office, took home a couple of Oscars as part of an impressive awards season haul and received any number of inexplicably rave reviews, this is an undeniably nervy move to make—perhaps not since the release of the infamous Exorcist II: The Heretic has a seemingly sure-thing sequel to a blockbuster taken such a brazenly bizarre turn in its efforts to subvert the expectations of its massive built-in audience. However, The Heretic, for all of the go-for-baroque crackpot weirdness that John Boorman brought to it that thoroughly appalled and irritated moviegoers who went in expecting more of the same, was a genuinely audacious work of pure cinematic craziness that grabbed you and kept you compelled, if only to see how nutty it could possibly get. Folie a Deux, for all of its outward trappings of weirdness, never manages to muster up the sense of edgy danger that it is clearly convinced that it contains. While the original proved to be deeply divisive to audiences, this one may well end up uniting them—the new approach will undoubtedly irritate those who actually found some kind of meaning in the first one while never quite being wild or subversive enough to win over those who didn’t.   

Set a couple of years after the events of the first film, in which proto-incel and failed comedian Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) embraced his dark side by appearing in his Joker persona and lashing out at the city that had previously ignored him, culminating with him murdering five people, including talk show host Murray Franklin on live television, Folie a Deux begins with the unnervingly gaunt Arthur locked away at the Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial, his already depressing existence now reduced to living in a filthy cell, emptying his pee bucket every morning and constantly being taunted by the guards to tell them a joke. One day, as a reward for good behavior, guard Jackie (Brendan Gleason) arranges for Arthur to participate in a music therapy class and it is there that he meets psychiatric patient Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga). Like everybody else, Lee has certainly heard of Arthur and she is one of those who has idealized both him and his crimes, even going so far as to repeatedly rewatch the cheeseball TV movie that was quickly ground out to monetize his notoriety. The two immediately fall in love and even when Lee is released from the hospital, she vows to stay true and be there for him during his upcoming trial, a media spectacular in the making that will even be broadcast live on television.

Of course, that trial is going to be a bit of a tricky thing since no one—not even Arthur himself—disputes the fact that he did in fact kill several people, including one broadcast to millions of late-night viewers. The only real issue at hand is whether he will be declared guilty by reason of insanity, a decision that would at least spare him from the death penalty. Seizing upon this, Arthur’s lawyer (Catherine Keener) puts forth the theory that it wasn’t really Arthur who committed the crimes, it was his alter-ego Joker, a split personality he developed as a way of trying to cope with a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse. Meanwhile, D.A. Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) is planning to argue that while Arthur does clearly suffer from a number of mental illnesses, none of them come close to meeting the bar for insanity and that he should be held responsible for his crimes. Even Arthur is conflicted in this regard—he knows that being declared insane is the only thing potentially keeping him from the electric chair but at the same time, bolstered in no small part by the love he shares with Harley, he yearns to once again embrace that persona, even to the point of letting it begin to take over as the trial begins.

Oh yeah, in addition all of this, Folie a Deux is also a musical in which the central characters break into song—occasionally in full-fledged production numbers—via a collection of familiar old tunes meant to serve as commentary on both the story and the inner turmoil of their characters, ranging from “That’s Entertainment” and “Get Happy” to “Close to You” and “For Once in My Life.” This is a choice, to be certain, and one that the first film certainly hinted at here and there—the odd jig that Arthur busted out after committing his first murders and the indelible moment in which he danced on those stairs to the tune of “Rock and Roll Part 2”—but after the initial shock of the conceit wears off, it ultimately ends up amounting to very little. However, if you are going to take a swing as crazily ambitious as this, you really need to have a director who is up to that task and in returning filmmaker Todd Phillips (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver), a person whose filmography is practically a testament to the tenets of faceless mediocrity,  the film comes up woefully short. There are a couple of moments along these lines that do work—particularly a full-on fantasy sequence in which Arthur and Lee, fully inhabited by their alter-egos of Joker and Harley Quinn, do a couple of songs in the form of a malevolent take on the old Sonny & Cher variety show—but for the most part, they exist only to further underscore points that have already been made at length without ever providing the kind of loopy pop that one might expect.

Another problem is that the choice of songs proves to be a little disappointing—with a couple of exceptions, they are pretty much all standards from the 40s and 50s that are familiar enough but which don’t really seem to have any particular resonance with the characters outside of the most obvious of explanations. Phillips is clearly trying to do something along the lines of Dennis Potter’s legendary Pennies from Heaven here but while one of the key points of that film was how people use the upbeat nature of popular culture to make sense of their comparatively humdrum lives. Here, you never get the sense that it is anything other than a stunt and that the songs were picked mostly because they were ones that Lady Gaga never got around to recording with Tony Bennett. Perhaps if the film had utilized newly composed songs that didn’t have prior associations and which were designed specifically to illustrate the twisted psyches of Arthur and Lee and how they end up unexpectedly harmonizing, both metaphorically and literally, the concept might have really worked. Barring that, Phillips probably should have cast a wider net for his song choices and musical genres that might have helped to accentuate the mad spirit he is trying to achieve.

That said, at least these reveries serve as a distraction from the unrelenting tedium that is the rest of Folie a Deux. For the vast majority of the film, we are either inside the courtroom as the debate rages on as to whether Arthur’s Joker persona is really a sign of a split personality or if the two are one and the same, a question that the first film more or less answered at length—he is just an ordinary lonely and disturbed guy who decided the only way for him to stand out was to kill people, not some slick and devious criminal mastermind whose outrageous ideas are leading a revolution in the streets among his ever-growing fan base—or in the prison hospital, with its own array of horrors and miseries. The screenplay is shockingly unambitious—for most of its running time, nothing of note really happens outside of the musical numbers and when big developments do occur, they are dropped in so gracelessly that we find ourselves assuming that they are also figments of Arthur’s tortured psyche but instead turn out to be clumsy plot twists, especially during the tedious final stretch leading to a seemingly out-of-nowhere concluding bit that will come as a shock to practically no one.

Even Phoenix’s return to the role that won him an Oscar proves to be peculiarly disappointing. I didn’t care for his work in that film—he was certainly acting all over the place but not even he could make sense out of the mashup of Pagliacci, Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin that he was asked to play—but at least it was something.  Here, the surprise of Arthur’s transformation into Joker is inevitably gone and neither he nor Phillips have figured out how to breathe new life into the part. What was once a live-wire turn has become a damp squib here and while Phoenix does throw himself into the role once again, right down to displaying a singing voice that sounds like an especially garrulous Randy Newman imitating the Dr. Dolittle-era Rex Harrison, but the effort is ultimately for naught—this Joker ultimately feels more like a Spirit Halloween version that hopes to evoke the spirit of its originator by which is ultimately too defanged and denuded to have any impact.

As much as I disliked Folie a Deux, I will concede that amidst the tepid outrages and lazy designer grimness, there are a couple of elements to it that do work and which help to elevate it above its loathsome predecessor. The film opens with an unexpected and fairly brilliant animated sequence by Sylvain Chomet, the director of the wonderful The Triplets of Belleville, that not beautifully evokes the look and feel of Golden Age-era Looney Tunes but does a better job of exploring both the debate about the schism between Arthur and Joker and the film’s musical ambitions (utilizing “Me and My Shadow” as a motif) to such a degree that you will wish that the entire film had been made along those lines or at least had a director willing to take such chances. And while her character is ultimately underused and absent from the proceedings for far too long, Lady Gaga is really quite good here, moving away from the broader take on the character that Margot Robbie has done in a number of films to do something more interesting by going for a more quiet and introspective approach that still allows you to see the potential madness bubbling just under the surface without calling attention to it. This extends to her singing as well—instead of giving us full-on Lady Gaga-stylized performances of the songs (save for her end credit rendition of “That’s Life”), she channels her character into the songs in ways that are convincingly authentic and which best suggest the film that Phillips was presumably hoping to get when and Silver first came up with the premise but could not quite pull off. And while this was clearly a bizarre coincidence, I was amused to discover that once again, we get a glimpse of a movie theatre marquee bearing the title of one of my favorite films—clearly Phillips knows what a good movie look like, even if he has yet to make one of his own.

For the most part, though, Joker: Folie a Deux is just a bore and even though I was not exactly looking forward to seeing it due to my loathing of the original, even I was a bit surprised by what a non-event it proved to be. As much as I hated Joker—if I didn’t have it as the worst film of 2019, it sure came close—at least it had the good grace to genuinely piss me off with its pretentious aesthetic and pseudo-meaningful Nihilism for Dummies attitude. By comparison, Folie a Deux is largely an exercise in tedium that, outside of the few bright moments, has nothing new to offer viewers and whose attempts at provocations are more boring than bold. If Joker was trying (and ultimately failing) to be the Natural Born Killers of its generation, this one is more like this generation’s SFW—it rehashes and regurgitates the themes of its predecessor in the most obvious and uninteresting of ways without bringing anything new to the party other than a karaoke machine.