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Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel. © Niko Tavernise
With his second “Joker”, Todd Phillips risks a blockbuster with almost no action – but with great songs.
Conrad Veidt played the first “Joker” in film history. In Paul Leni’s silent film he is “The Man Who Laughed” based on Victor Hugo’s novel. The tragic hero, who had a grotesque grin on his face as a child, inspired the supervillain who was first immortalized in comic form in 1940. Its creators, Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, later acknowledged the influence of the German silent film star.
If ever there was a man for the macabre, it’s this comic book hero. He draws all his energy from destruction, all his fun from malice, all his pleasure from anarchy. And yet: The Joker can’t get out of his skin, and that’s why we have to feel sorry for him. In his legendary performance in “The Dark Knight,” the young star Heath Ledger, who died before the premiere, brought back the delicate ambivalence of the role model. An even sadder clown was Joaquin Phoenix in his Oscar-winning performance in Todd Phillips’ “Joker,” which became the first comic book blockbuster to win the Venice Film Festival in 2019. Fairy-tale box office results really rewarded the deep look behind the mask. But what happened now?
The sequel: “Joker: Folie à Deux” is met with criticism in the USA. The evaluation by the film review portal “Rotten Tomatoes” yields a whopping 63 percent of positive reviews. The big media in particular are ruthless in their criticism of the courtroom film. Star critic David Ehrlich complained that Joaquin Phoenix’s film partner Lady Gaga was so wasted that a public hearing should be demanded. The filmmakers’ courage to break with expectations in such a way deserves respect. The previous film brought in more than a billion in box office, and this sequel cost around 200 million.
It is always a risk for a major film studio like Warner Brothers to expose a blockbuster to press judgment and the risk of “spoilers” weeks before its theatrical release. But what secrets could be revealed from a musical that is set almost entirely in a prison and a courtroom? And just in the paths in between, when the city lights are reflected in the window of the police van with the colors of the sad Joker grimace behind it, it provokes a comparison with the iconic Batman film “The Dark Knight”?
Phillips’ film is far closer in pathos and longing for death to Lars von Trier’s deep black musical “Dancer in the Dark”. Arthur Fleck, played by Phoenix, is on trial for five murders, which are remembered – as a supporting film – by a “Looney Tunes” cartoon recreated by guest director Sylvain Chomet. He doesn’t want to adopt the strategy of the defense attorney (Catherine Keener) that it is not Fleck but the Joker who is responsible for the actions as Mr. Hyde with a split personality. Carried away by the dubious fame of a fanatical fan crowd, he puts make-up on his face and, as the Joker, adopts his own defense strategy as an angry speech to a loveless society.
During a music therapy session in the special prison for mentally abnormal offenders, the “Arkham Asylum”, a particularly ardent fan captured his heart: Harleen Quinzel, played by Lady Gaga, behind whom there is a character from the animated Batman television series , the female Joker counterpart Harley Quinn. According to the old rule of pot and lid, however, it is the anarchic Joker with whom the Joker falls in love, not the lonely and unloved Mr. Everyman who ultimately throws his heart at her defenseless feet.
Until then, both of them repeatedly confess their feelings to each other in song numbers that flow smoothly from the dialogue. With the exception of one new composition, there are radio classics such as Stevie Wonder’s “For Once In My Life” or “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees. The selection of standards from the American songbook is also rich, even at the risk that today’s audience hardly knows them anymore. This is how the Frank Sinatra classic “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” from the musical “Pal Joey” becomes an inner monologue about the inner alienation from a reality – whatever that term means in Gotham City. The Fred Astaire showstopper “That’s Entertainment” is played several times, as if the theme of the previous film – violence as fodder for an entertainment-addicted media culture – needed another exclamation point.
There are hardly any choreographed dance numbers, which is a shame, but the intimate staging of the songs against the black backgrounds of the imagination gives them a rare intimacy. There is a lot to experience in a film with almost no plot, and in a genre – if you can call the “blockbuster” that – in which the fear of emptiness hardly tolerates a pause for a few seconds. In contrast, this unusual film leads us into a world of emotions that is as petrified and lost as the Joker’s face.
Joker: Folie à Deux. USA 2024. Director: Todd Phillips. 138 mins
