Joker

Joker is an oddity, an American art-house movie peddled to mass market audiences.  Ostensibly, it's a prequel to Batman movies featuring the villainous super-criminal, the Joker.  But the film is wholly unlike the jolly mayhem cheerfully featured in most super-hero movies -- there are no action sequences with cape-clad crusaders hurling bad guys through skyscrapers or into elevated trains (with no apparent injury to the fellow hurled in this way).  Rather, the violence seems adapted from the horrific slaughter at the end of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a movie that the film closely resembles and cites repeatedly.  There's very little fighting in Joker -- the violent scenes involve groups of men stomping on prone victims, riots on the streets in which mobs of men dressed as clowns over turn over cars, maul cops, and throw Molotov cocktails, a Scorsese-like shooting in a subway, and a murder using scissors that is filmed like a sequence in a horror film.  In fact, the movie is generally shot like a horror film -- it features many cramped interiors and, even, the city streets are hedged about with towering piles of bagged garbage (the action takes place during a garbage strike):  everything is jammed together in moldering rooms where you can almost smell the rot and the mildew on the walls. A few exterior shots, mostly showing trains running toward the battered, broken-tooth profile of the city skyline have the nightmarish aspect of the opening scenes in The Shining -- everything is utterly ominous, squalid, filthy.  Most of the shots are underlit and crammed with junk, lit with a quasi-Rembrandt sickly yellow glow.  Not content to hem in the claustrophobic shots from the sides, the director Todd Phillips, features some scenes in which lit rooms are compressed under coffin-like lids of construction above them.  The entire movie is a sort of pressure-cooker; the camera moving ominously as it prowls through the film's junk-heap.  About half of the picture is shot in extreme close-up.  The film's second to last shot is a long close-up of the face of its anti-hero, the Joker (aka Arthur Fleck). 

The movie is already famous for Joaquin Phoenix's performance, although it is not quite as original as some critics think.  In fact, Phoenix, playing Joker, used his hawk-like cartoonish features and mop of dirty-looking hair to similar effect in Paul Thomas Anderson's  The Master.  Phoenix has a weird-looking, scrawny body -- he seems to have a joint at about this third thoracic vertebrae that lets him bend his back into a kind of convex hump located a foot below his shoulder blades.  In some scenes, he seems to be carrying a fleshy carapace on his back, his rounded spine simulating a turtle's shell or the hunched back of a cockroach.  Phoenix can make himself look very disfigured and gaunt -- in one scene, he sucks in his gut and creates a gaping cavity hollowed-out under his rib cage.  This is all unsettling, although Phoenix used these same effects in the Anderson film to depict a monstrous subaltern, a sort of deranged Caliban in alliance in with the sophisticated and silver-haired grace of his boss, The Master (impersonating L. Ron Hubbard) as played by Philip Hoffman.  Phoenix's star-turn is the main reason to see the film.  It is otherwise highly derivative of pictures by Martin Scorsese, both Taxi Driver, as earlier noted, and, even more directly, The King of Comedy.  In fact, Robert de Niro who was brilliant in both of these movies (these are iconic performances from the late seventies and early eighties) appears in Joker to cement the connection between his films for Scorsese and this picture.  De Niro plays a late night talk show host, a character brash and cruel and very similar to the part played by Jerry Lewis with weird, callous indifference in the King of Comedy.  In Joker, the poor abused Arthur Fleck (who will become the insane super-criminal)  longs to appear on the late night TV talk show with his idol played by Robert de Niro, the show's host.  Similarly, Rupert Pupkin (played by de Niro) in The King of Comedy  similarly longed to appear on the Tonight show, imagined as hosted by Jerry Lewis -- this longing turns to insane rage when Pupkin abducts the late-night talk show host.  Joker is less witty and more brutally direct -- appearing on the Late Night show hosted by de Niro, he tells inane jokes, smirks at the audience in his Joker make-up, and, then, puts a bullet through the brain of his host. 

Joker is a pathography, that is, the story of a person with severe and disabling mental illness. Arthur Fleck lives with his mother who is completely insane in a filthy, gloomy apartment in a crumbling building.  He works at HaHa's, a dismal business that supplies "clowns" for events.  While advertising in clown mufti on the garbage-heaped mean streets of Gotham City, Fleck is assaulted by some juvenile delinquents and stomped badly in an alley.  A fellow clown, someone always mocking Fleck, gives him a gun.  Fleck is so clueless that he lets the gun drop out of the garments while performing a show for child cancer-victims at the local cancer ward.  HaHa's fires him and Fleck decides to investigate his mother's claim that he is the son of the local mayor and political bigwig,  Thomas Wayne.  Late at night, there's an altercation in a subway car and Fleck massacres three Wall Street guys -- they are portrayed as bullies who get what they deserve.  The City is divided about the killings -- some people decry the massacre but others take to wearing clown masks and rioting in the street.  The city is on the verge of a complete anarchy: the nerds and losers (people others call "jokers") have taken to wearing masks and burning cop cars while looting.  Fleck goes to see Thomas Wayne and meets the young Bruce Wayne (who will later be the Batman) in an eerie and disturbing scene.  Afterwards, he goes to Arkham Hospital to look at his mother's medical records, he discovers that he was tortured by his mother and her boyfriend when he was a little boy and that she chained him to a radiator in the  filthy apartment.  It's also clear that her claim that Arthur is the son of Thomas Wayne is delusional.  The police are closing in on  Fleck for the subway killings.  When the cops interview Fleck's mother, she has a stroke.  Now completely deranged, Fleck gets invited to appear on the Late Night Talk Show with his hero Murray Franklin (played by de Niro).  The host has seen a tape of Fleck performing a mirthless show at a local comedy club and invites Fleck on TV in order to make fun of him.  Fleck shoots the host in the face during the TV show and flees through the chaos of the city in which clown riots are everywhere occurring.  The cops catch him after some violent scenes of fighting in the streets and he ends up in an asylum.  Of course, this narrative is meant to be the backstory (or origin narrative) of the Joker. 

The film is made with the utmost conviction and buoyed into art by the extraordinary performance by Joaquin Phoenix as the insane and horribly mistreated Arthur Fleck.  The picture is rife with baroque and monstrous scenes -- we see Fleck for instance washing the back of his nude and elderly mother who sits in a dirty-looking porcelain bathtub.  When Fleck goes to Arkham Hospital, he rides stoically in an elevator in which a mad man is writhing with seizures, shackled to a gurney.  After putting on his Joker costume, Fleck descends a flight of stairs tightly confined between tenements doing a grandiose sort of dance.   Phoenix acts with his whole body -- his forehead is a corrugated mass of wrinkles, he stoops and squats and shuffles around like a demented crab.  He celebrates murders with baroque gestures, muttering to himself, and holding out his arms like an actor in an early 18th century opera.  There's not much to the movie's plot and most of the other characters are woefully underwritten.  Fleck has a girlfirend with a child (the woman seems almost normal among all the grotesques in the film) and they go out on several dates -- the girlfriend is like the Cybil Shepherd character, the political operator, in Taxi Driver.  The script can't figure out the attraction between the couple and the actress playing this part gets almost no lines.  Furthermore, the script doesn't know what to do with the relationship -- there's an implication that Joker kills both her and her little girl, although we don't see this mayhem on screen.  The picture is like a train wreck -- you want to look away from all the misery and horror, but it's so compelling that you just keep peeking through your fingers.  It's not a pleasant experience and the young audience at the screening that I attended seemed restless and completely baffled.  But the film is certainly art of a particular (if punishing)  kind and, although I didn't really like watching it, I have to admit that I'm glad I saw the picture and, indeed, am haunted by some parts of the movie.