Joker Folie à deux opens with the sort of stylishly vacuous sequence director Todd Phillips is so great at realizing: an animated short modeled after Warner Brothers’ vintage Looney Tunes cartoons starring Joker— the psychopathic clown with a sadistic sense of humor, most known for existing as the arch villain to DC Comics’ superhero Batman— titled Me and My Shadow. While broadly laying out the central tenants of not only the character but the film, a sequel to 2019’s Joker— that mild-mannered Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is constantly existing in the shadow of his more violent, more charismatic alter ego who has captured the attention of rabid fans worldwide— it also sets an expectation for the format of the film, which was pitched as a musical from a concept dreamed up by Phoenix. As cartoon Joker flits through the hallways of a television studio, posters can be glimpsed on the wall: for big song-and-dance shows popular through the 50s and 60s like Sweet Charity, The Band Wagon, and Pal Joey, and reaching back to the 30s with the more elegant Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle Shall We Dance and Charlie Chaplin’s comedy Modern Times— not a musical, per se, but the origin of the song “Smile,” which was featured prominently in the first Joker’s trailer.
These references set an expectation for what’s to follow, but Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver resist leaning into glossy music numbers and choreographed routines. Their musical, if you can even call it that, exists only in their characters’ heads, the songs— a series of standards with pointed lyrics about love and life, ranging from “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” to “For Once in My Life” to “When You’re Smiling”— giving voice to the emotions they cannot voice out loud (cinematographer Lawrence Sher cites Francis Ford Coppola’s neon-drenched and artifice-driven 1982 musical One from the Heart as inspiration for the film’s visuals, but with its frequently dark and grounded aesthetic, Folie à deux feels like it’s more indebted to Coppola’s film, in which the characters don’t actually sing themselves but songs play over their actions as voice-over, structurally). Phoenix and costar Lady Gaga, joining the cast as Arthur’s new love interest Lee Quinzel (based on the character Harley Quinn), perform live, their voices raw and honest and intentionally a little off-key. It’s a choice, one of a few bold turns that Phillips attempts to steer his movie in, none of which actually work. The songs, thematically repetitive and unpleasing to the ear, are a chore to sit through.
It may be more, or at least equally as, accurate to refer to Joker Folie à deux (a French term that translates to “madness for two”) as a courtroom drama, but its drawn out with the same lack of panache that the musical aspect of the film is. That’s not to say that there isn’t the seed of an interesting idea propelling it forward. Phillips engages in a surprising amount of course correction with his sequel, following Joker’s (likely unintentional) catering to a sect of toxic fans who took the film’s apparent positioning of Joker as an anti-hero too far, leading to a barrage of hateful vitriol directed toward detractors of the film’s portrayal of the intersection of violence and mental health (this critic included). Set in 1983, two years after the finale of Joker, which saw Joker murder several people, including a talk show host live on air, Arthur is in custody in Arkham State Hospital awaiting his trial. He’s constant subject to abuse from the Arkham guards, particularly Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson), but his supportive lawyer Maryanne (Catherine Keener) intends to try to get him out on the basis of his having a dissociative identity disorder that made him not entirely responsible for the crimes committed under the guise of Joker. But while up to that point Arthur appeared to drift through his existence in prison with little response to everything happening around and to him, everything changes when he meets Lee at a music therapy class. Lee, who claims to have come from a similar background as him— hailing from the same poor neighborhood, putting up with abusive parents who didn’t understand her— gets him. Not only that, she worships him; she shows genuine interest in him, and claims to have watched a TV movie that was based on his life 20 times (“It was good,” she assures him when he asks). But Phillips’ interpretation of the character, aided by the sly power of Gaga’s performance, twists away from her original iteration in Batman: The Animated Series, which found her a peppy young woman obsessively devoted to the Joker at the detriment to her own well-being. While, as they spend more time together, Arthur falls in love with a woman, Lee falls in love with an idea. The closest Phillips brings the film to a full-on musical are in a few flights of fantasy that mimic some of the films referenced in the opening cartoon, but they are awkwardly cut into the movie and struggle to really drive home the inequalities in their relationship. Early in the film, Arthur and Lee sneak out of a prison screening of 1953’s The Band Wagon, in the middle of the “That’s Entertainment” number performed by Fred Astaire, Jack Buchanan, Oscar Levant, and Nanette Fabray, the lyrics echoing the film’s hollow actions:
“A clown with his pants falling down
Or the dance that’s a dream of a romance
Or the scene where the villain is mean
That’s entertainment!”
That second line is visually reflected shortly after in a brief dream sequence modeled after the final number in the 1936 Astaire/Rogers musical Swing Time. Arthur— in full Joker face makeup— and Lee waltz across a rooftop beneath the blue light of an artificial moon, their movements mimicking those of Astaire and Rogers nearly beat-for-beat, the look completed by Gaga’s costuming, sporting the same strappy white gown worn by Rogers. But beyond the use of the scene as an avenue for escape beyond their current dire circumstances, this sequence has little of note to say about its characters. It has nothing of note to say about musicals, and how they often blur the line between reality and fantasy, which Folie à deux’s song numbers remain too grounded in the real to commit to. It’s just another instance of Phillips— whose Joker lifted not only story beats but entire specific sequences from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy— and his work being referential without vision.
Folie à deux’s other fantasy sequence hits a little closer to the truth Phillips is striving toward. A few times, the film cuts to Joker and Lee on stage, Gotham City’s equivalent to Sonny and Cher in their own sort of twisted variety show. At one point, Joker turns to Lee and states, “I don’t think we’re giving the people what they want.” The idea of Joker continues to be broken down in the lengthy courtroom scenes that dominate the second half of the film, as the anti-establishment icon is revealed to be little more than a sad and pathetic man, the tide of the fans surrounding the courthouse dressed in his image eventually turning against him. There are a few acknowledgments here: the first is the pretty routine concept of toxic fandom’s— and the media’s— tendency to turn the scandal of the moment into a circus. The second is a far more intriguing prospect: the expectation fans of certain IPs— comic books in particular— place on creators to deliver the kind of (often risk-averse) content they desire, or face backlash. That Phillips was bold enough to consciously make a film that he knew the fans of his previous movie, and comic book movies in general, wouldn’t clamor for (even if the court scenes do manage to possess some eye-roll-inducing franchise connective tissue in the form of young attorney Harvey Dent’s, played by Harry Lawtey, presence) and acknowledge that within the movie deserves some credit. But the filmmaking is just so turgid, so lacking in ingenuity, that those concepts— as much on the surface as they sit— become harder to grasp on to. Phoenix continues to be committed, physically and otherwise (he did win an Oscar for previously playing Joker), but Gaga’s Lee falls by the wayside as Joker (both the movie and the character) is litigated, and the film falters for it. The sound design, and how the live-singing and needle drops are integrated into Hildur Guðnadóttir’s sorrowful string score, is messy. The film’s climax, during which Arthur is literally chased by others modeled in his image, brings the story back around to its beginning, but for what? For what risks it does take, it only becomes more obvious the longer Folie à deux trundles on that Joker was always intended to be a standalone film. After a while, the repeated refrains of “That’s Entertainment!” begin to sound like a threat. If the intention of the sequel was to punish the audience for seeking entertainment the same way Joker suffered for it, then Phillips knocked it out of the park.
Joker Folie à deux is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 138 minutes. Rated R.
Katie at the Movies 