About half way through Joker I wondered what I would say if someone asked me what I thought of the film.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” was what I considered my response would be.
Doesn’t bode well for a review, perhaps, but I think it stands up. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to burden you what I did think; only that, as there are as many Joker origin stories as people to invent them, nobody else’s is ever going to be on the button. The most important element of Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story is that he got it made. I haven’t got mine made; I haven’t even got one to get made, but I do have a clear idea of who the Joker is and most of us, when we are given an end point, can have a stab at getting there.
By which I suppose I mean that Joker is a kind of fan-fic; it’s hardly canon; it’s more a riff or two or three on what’s gone before. No one who comes along to reimagine the Joker or Gotham is going to feel beholden to this film, unless, I suppose, they make a sequel. Joker 2: After the Laughter, perhaps.
There’s a lot to like in Joker. Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing especially. The grit of a trash-strewn Gotham Bronx. Just the very idea of dragging the supernal Joker down into the dirt of having an origin story in the first place, especially one as scrawny and craggy as this one. The violence was satisfyingly authentic. The cinematography, the choreography, the acting were all great. Atlanta’s Paper Boi pitched up in a great scene. The plot twists were – sometimes – effective, while the fears of incel inspo and hand-wringing about Gary Glitter seem wide of the mark.
But there’s a lot not to like. It’s a very confused film. It’s confused about mental illness. It’s confused about protest movements. It’s confused about abuse victims. It’s confused about how old Joker even is (it implies he’s 30, but Phoenix is 44 and looks and acts it; in any case even if he was 30, could the Joker really be 20 years older than Batman?). It's confused about what happens when you suddenly stop taking seven different types of medication.
Its cake-and-eat-it attitude to psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucination, child abuse – that these real, actual real things that happen to actual real people can somehow be juggled in such a way as to give us a plausible origin for something as implausible as a fucking superhuman killer clown – was undignified. It had little or nothing to offer about the world as we find it today, when the killer clowns are running the fucking show. Even its take on Taxi Driver-era New York amounted to no more than saying funding cuts in mental health provision are bad. Not an awful message, but thin.
Of course it’s a comic book, so perhaps it’s too much to ask for more. But of course, it’s not a comic book at all; it’s real, real, realism, not even magic realism, and certainly not comic book. The crux of the film is that the Joker is brought down to earth, explicated in terms of what might happen to any of us; the unreal made real by the force of plot. And it fell well short of managing the lofty goal, although there was plenty of fun on the way.
And the less said about the strand with Bobby De Niro the better – in terms of script anyway, although the joke at the end was pretty good.
