Todd Phillips (2019)
Strange days at the cinema … Last month, it was James Gray’s Ad Astra, a space adventure that discredited the quest for extraterrestrial life. Now along comes Todd Phillips’s Joker, a film based on DC Comics characters and bereft of superheroism. Ad Astra had me wondering if sci-fi fans were left licking their wounds, Joker if Batman aficionados felt hard done by. Phillips, hitherto known as a director of broad comedy (The Hangover trilogy, etc), co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver, who has majored in life-affirming dramas (The Fighter, The Finest Hours, Stronger). They use Gotham City and Bruce Wayne’s family merely as grist to their psychological horror-thriller mill. To many minds, the Joker has stolen the limelight before now. Plenty in the audience for Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) felt Jack Nicholson eclipsed Michael Keaton. Though I wasn’t among them, I agreed with just about everyone that Heath Ledger’s Joker thoroughly upstaged Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008). This time, there’s no contest. For one thing, Bruce appears only as a child (Dante Pereira-Olson) and never as the Caped Crusader. The Joker, aka Arthur Fleck, is no longer a supporting role antagonist but the star of the show. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, he is nearly the whole show.
Joker is set in Gotham-ie-New-York-City in 1981 – or so it appears: a cinema is showing Blow Out and Zorro, the Gay Blade. The major movie references in this origin story, however, are to two other films, both by Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982). The importance of the references is confirmed by the casting in Joker of Robert De Niro, the lead in both the Scorseses. Fortyish Arthur Fleck suffers from unspecified mental illness and a presumably neurological condition (also unspecified) that causes him to laugh uncontrollably and often inappropriately. He lives with his mother Penny (Frances Conroy), herself mentally and physically ill. Arthur is registered with a clown agency and gets bits of work, including as a children’s party entertainer. But, like De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, he really wants to be a stand-up comedian. Also like Rupert, Arthur sees as a means to that end an established comedian and talk-show host. His name is Murray Franklin and he’s played by De Niro.
The resonances with Taxi Driver are more allusive and troubling. New York City was becoming the world capital of urban decay when Scorsese shot his film there in the mid-1970s. His expressionist style intensified the moral hell-on-earth perceived by Travis Bickle through the windscreen of his yellow cab but Scorsese didn’t need to build sets to create the basis of Travis’s vision: the actual New York streets did that. Squalor is intrinsic to Gotham City too; and Phillips, with his DP Lawrence Sher, replicates the sulphurous, end-of-days lighting familiar from previous Batman movies. The effect is very different, though, because nothing fantastic occurs in this latest Gotham City story. The visuals of Joker don’t evoke Taxi Driver but the plot does, and the tale of Arthur Fleck isn’t fundamentally more far-fetched than that of Travis Bickle.
Like Travis and Rupert Pupkin, Arthur wants to make a connection with people in the world outside his head but fails to do so, until he resorts to sociopathic crime. Travis intended to shoot a candidate for political office, though that didn’t happen. Joker/Arthur’s victims include Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), Bruce’s billionaire father, who is running for mayor of Gotham City. Rupert kidnapped the talk-show host Jerry Langford, the ransom demand a ten-minute appearance on Jerry’s show. Someone sends Murray Franklin video of Arthur’s failed stand-up routine in a local bar: Arthur is, inadvertently, the only person laughing at his ineptly delivered jokes; Murray mockingly plays the recording and has his studio audience in stitches. Arthur’s unfunny but laughable routine goes down a storm with the public (though this isn’t so easily credible in a story set before the viral internet age). As a result, Murray, with an eye to the main chance, invites Arthur onto the show. This culminates in the guest’s shooting the host dead.
Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are set in contemporary New York, so around the same time and in just the same place as Joker, but Todd Phillips clearly means his film to resonate with the present day too. In an early scene, Arthur, in clown costume and make-up, stands in the street advertising a store’s closing-down sale: the ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO’ notice announces a world of moral and economic (and predicts Arthur’s psychological) breakdown. Social service cuts mean he can no longer get the medication he needs and wants more and more of. His mother vacantly watches television every waking, or semi-conscious, hour. While these elements could plausibly have been attached to an American story happening at various times during the last half century, the political references are more immediately topical – although they don’t map neatly onto characters in Joker. Thomas Wayne, condemning the subway killing of three Wayne Enterprises businessmen as motivated by envy of their success, labels Gotham City have-nots ‘clowns’. This triggers street demonstrations about economic inequality in the city with protesters in masks replicating Arthur’s clown make-up. Whereas Thomas Wayne shares Trump’s wealth and boorishness, the ‘clowns’ insult echoes Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’. At the same time, Arthur’s description of those he kills as ‘awful people’ brings to mind Trump’s partiality for describing various opponents and targets as ‘terrible’ human beings.
A month on from its release in North America, Joker has, according to Wikipedia, become ‘the highest-grossing R rated film of all time’ with an international box office total of $938m (against a $55-70m budget). The fierce and widespread backlash against the film is understandable and, in certain respects, not easy to argue with. Writing about Joker after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on the last day of August, Stephanie Zacharek labelled Arthur Fleck as ‘the patron saint of incels’. Her Time review was headlined ‘Joker Wants to Be a Movie About the Emptiness of Our Culture. Instead, It’s a Prime Example of It’. There’s no denying that Todd Phillips, by foregrounding (without explaining) Arthur’s mental illness, avoids wrestling with his resemblance to actual homicidal maniacs in the US. The moment when a gun given him by his clown co-worker Randall (Glenn Fleshler) falls out of Arthur’s pocket while he’s entertaining in a children’s hospital is dramatically effective but too near the bone – not only because it brings to mind what lone gunmen have really done in American schools but because it’s calculated to do so. The same is true of a sequence where Arthur makes his way into a cinema, even though, as at the hospital, he doesn’t turn his weapon on the audience there. It’s no wonder the movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado where James Holmes killed twelve people and injured scores of others at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, has refused to show Joker.
Some aspects of the outrage voiced are more questionable. Among film reviewers, as distinct from other members of the press who’ve attacked it, dislike of Joker has probably been intensified by what happened in Venice. It’s not unusual, of course, for a big-budget, commercially ambitious movie to screen at one of the top international festivals or even to get ‘an eight-minute standing ovation’, as this one allegedly did. It is unusual for such a film to win such a festival’s top prize. Stephanie Zacharek was too quick off the mark to be included in this category but the surprise Golden Lion award to Joker will have sharpened some critics’ hostility to it – ditto the fact that the film is exciting to watch and, within the terms of the story, not undisciplined. While there’s no shortage of bloody violence, this is rationed: Joker isn’t a continuous serial killer/mass murderer rampage.
More specific objections include those raised by Richard Brody in the New Yorker that Joker ‘is an intensely racialized movie’ that suggests Arthur ‘becomes violent after being assaulted by a group of people of color’. That’s not the case: the assault on Arthur in the street results in Randall’s giving him a gun but Arthur doesn’t fire it until the subway encounter with the Wayne Enterprises trio. They’re white but this, to Brody, is unacceptable de-racialisation because the incident is ‘ an evocation of the shooting, in 1984, by Bernhard Goetz, of four teen-agers in a subway who, Goetz believed, were about to rob him. They were four black teen-agers, and Goetz, after his arrest, made racist remarks. … Todd Phillips … whitewashes Goetz’s attack, eliminating any racial motive and turning it into an act of self-defense gone out of control’. Yet Brody would also have complained, and with more reason, if Arthur’s victims had been black. None of them is. When Randall and another ex-co-worker Gary (Leigh Gill) visit Arthur’s apartment shortly before his TV show appearance, Gary, who’s a dwarf, gets out alive – quite right too, since he’s never done Arthur wrong. Even so, Joker’s selection of victims – exclusively white and, with the exception of his mother, able-bodied – eventually creates the odd impression that, for all his craziness, he’s not devoid of political correctness.
That’s no doubt because Phillips recognises the need to be PC but he does challenge viewers by inviting, if not complicity with Arthur’s actions, sympathy with his hostility. The protagonist not only doesn’t kill indiscriminately; he isn’t wrong in calling his victims ‘awful’. Of the three drunken businessmen on the subway, who taunt Arthur in his clown get-up, he shoots two in self-defence before murdering the third. Randall, who denied giving Arthur his gun, is quite a scumbag. If Bruce Wayne’s mother Martha (Carrie Louise Putrello) is an innocent victim, his loathsome father certainly isn’t. Murray Franklin is the mercenary tin heart of show business. We find out, along with Arthur, about the abuse he suffered as a child. After that, even his matricide doesn’t feel groundless.
I was predisposed to dislike Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Arthur. Phoenix is, as well as a talented actor, a versatile one. His work in Walk the Line (2005), The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice (2014) made me look forward to whatever he did next. He’s clearly drawn, though, to playing psychologically extreme characters – the protagonist of You Were Never Really Here (2017), for example. By the time I saw The Sisters Brothers (2018) in April this year, I thought Phoenix was too obviously cast as the maniacal sibling. Arthur Fleck is what he seems to have been building towards in recent years and the prospect was unappealing. The result, however, is the best performance in a new film that I’ve seen this year.
It builds inexorably from the unnerving opening shot of Arthur, in clown make-up, seated before a mirror and manipulating his mouth into the theatrical masks of comedy and tragedy. He’s alarming in verging-on-violent encounters with the Waynes’ butler Pennyworth (Douglas Hodge) and a hospital clerk (Brian Tyree Henry). Phoenix’s achievement is altogether too powerful to describe easily. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay is to say he’s as unnerving without Joker make-up as he is with it; and that, in or out of greasepaint, his character seems deeply grief-stricken too. The many accusations levelled at Joker include a cavalier treatment of mental illness: the empathy with which Phoenix plays Arthur proves otherwise. He lost a great deal of weight to do the part – four stone allegedly, and it’s not hard to believe. Phoenix is so skinny that when I first saw him stripped to the waist I wondered if I was watching CGI. His movement is often confounding, sometimes wonderfully graceful. This is exceptional screen acting.
Just ahead of his leading role in Scorsese’s The Irishman, Robert De Niro, as Murray Franklin, comes through with some of his most entertaining and incisive work in years – the effect fortified by the King of Comedy connection that De Niro embodies – even if I didn’t believe that shrewdly populist Murray would have let Arthur say and do outrageous things on a live TV show for as long as he does. Joker compares favourably with the Rupert Pupkin story in at least one respect. Richard Brody also notes that Arthur ‘suffers callous behavior from one black woman, and believes that he’s being ignored by another’. I don’t even know who the former woman is – surely not Arthur’s social worker (Sharon Washington)? The latter is his neighbour Sophie (Zazie Beetz), a young single mother. I could never believe in The King of Comedy that Rupert had managed to persuade a beautiful woman – a woman of colour (Diahnne Abbott, De Niro’s wife at the time) – to spend time with him. In Joker, Arthur’s dating of Sophie turns out, more credibly, to be his fantasy. Todd Phillips makes the rhythm of his delusions – which also include appearing on the Franklin show long before he actually does – persuasive.
The music is consistently unsurprising but works well. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s original score channels contributions to earlier Batman films. There are not a few references to popular songs recommending stoicism and/or facial dissimulation – ‘That’s Life’, ‘Smile’, ‘Put On a Happy Face’. It’s a treat to hear Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Send in the Clowns’ over the closing credits. Joker is a problematic movie but it was one that absorbed and, thanks chiefly to Joaquin Phoenix, impressed me. I’m just not able – as many people clearly are able – to proceed easily from moral qualms about a film to dismissal of it as a piece of cinema.
17 October 2019
