Joker (2019)

Spoilers Abound

Forget dark knights and flying mammals, this is one sad/sick tale that ’al have you nervously looking over your shoulder in the day-time. It’s a reimagined Gotham City circa 1980. This is not from the annuls of the DC Comic Batman universe you know and love(sic). A stand-alone movie, Joker is a parallel universe much like the timeline disturbance of Back to the Future II, where that dark dirty violent world is actually your reality.

Writer/Director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver’s homage to movies Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983) is obvious here. What’s not so obvious is the storyline and what it’s actually trying to tell us. Joker is subversive, perhaps one of the reasons it won the Golden Lion award at this year’s Venice Film Festival.  

Clown Wars - everything must go

Another reason could be Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck/Joker, the ultimate anti-hero. He puts up a mirror to the world and shows us that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, there are always forces with greater power out there. You beat them by destroying them and replacing them with something more powerful. Our protagonist Arthur knows the difference between right and wrong, Joker doesn’t, as he asks us to examine our heroes. Do we know who they are? The people we worship and love, are they worthy of our affection?

Arthur’s motives throughout are in fact honourable and good. He’s disillusioned he says because he doesn’t know he exists, but he also clearly advertises that he has a brain injury, while teasing the cops that he might not. His mother loves him though. (Frances Conroy as Penny, Arthur’s elderly mother, doing a sort of Room 237 prequal scene is so good here.) 

What happens to a mad man when he has nothing left to lose? Actions have consequences, however strange that may seem in this Joker’s universe, and those consequences lead to metamorphosis of a very menacing kind. Are we seeing reality from his point of view, is it all in the mind, just an illusion, a magic trick?

The way Phoenix handles Arthur’s depths of despair and the journey is awe inspiring too – from the nuanced looks to the way he smokes that cigarette, you gotta hand it to him, he’s as good as he was in ‘The Master’ (2012) and ‘You Were Never Really Here’ (2017). I had to look away at one ultra-close-up violent scene, as I’ve become squeamish to fake blood in my old age, not so desensitized yet.

Critics are divided on the influential nature of the violence portrayed in this movie. What can’t be denied is the orchestration and musical score, the soundtrack, complimenting a familiar skyline, that is not your usual superhero/supervillain landscape. Touching a little too close to home, where people wear their clown masks on the tube to demonstrations, like the 99% and Anonymous fans wore theirs once, while on their way to Manhattan or DC. The violence is straight from the streets of Paris at the weekend and Hong Kong last night.

When a dubious friend gives clown-for-hire Arthur a gun to protect himself, you know where that’s heading. The girl next door makes a joke about blowing brains out, you know where that's going, his idol takes him down on live tv… you know how that’s going to end up too. (Robert De Niro as Murray Franklin, who I’ve lost respect for, does a fine job).

Arthur writes in his daily diary that, “the worst thing about having mental illness is that people want you to act like you don’t”! This is the problem, no one is listening, but by the end of the movie they won’t be able to ignore him anymore. 

With titillating billboards lighting up the city streets, adding a comic touch to a tragic scene of murder and mayhem, the Joker is reborn. Culminating this surreal vision, Arthur Fleck is no more. 

The film reveals to us that we’re living in a sick world, and it’s no joke. Watch at your peril.