The Joker a Surprisingly Good Film

The Joker (2019)

Directed by Todd Phillips

Warner Brothers, 122 minutes, R (language, violence, brief sexuality)

★★★★

I grew up with comic books and still enjoy them, even though they’ve been upgraded to “graphic novels.” I’m not, however, a fan of tinkering with established franchises, especially all the Superman multiverse narratives. For me, Batman was the only reboot that worked. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is more compelling than the original DC Comic Caped Crusader, and is infinitely better than the campy TV show (1965-68). Still, I avoided The Joker when it was released for fear it would be another alt.universe tale the likes of which I’ve had my fill. Mea culpa. The Joker is a really good flick and I can see why Joaquin Phoenix won a Best Actor Oscar.

The Joker gives Batman’s nemesis a credible backstory that makes him more than an evil clown. Is evil in-bred or the result of bad socialization? In the case of Arthur Fleck–The Joker’s identity–it’s a toxic mix of both. He lives in a squalid apartment with his disabled mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), who writes endless letters to her former employer: Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), whom she insists is Arthur’s father. Arthur also carries a physical handicap that’s like a reverse Tourette’s; he cannot control the impulse to laugh manically in inappropriate situations. (I had to look this up; it’s a real thing: pseudobulbar affect, or PBA.) Arthur’s cackle is about as pleasant as the sound of a dental drill and invites thrashings. His disabilities even impact his demeaning job as a party clown. He’d like to be a stand-up comic, but he has no aptitude for it, though his single-mother neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) encourages him. Arthur’s one gig is so bad, though, that someone filmed it and it airs as a can-you-believe-this-guy? segment on the popular Murray Franklin Show. (Robert De Niro plays Franklin.)

Toss in rejection from Wayne, betrayal by a colleague, and discovery of his mother’s secrets, and Arthur is a classic case of a guy getting kicked around until he snaps. Phoenix is brilliant in his portrayal of a troubled man on slow burn. He plays Arthur as a man leaking weirdness all of a social carpet that he’s about to pull from under our feet. An old sociological maxim holds that social outcasts react across a spectrum of options that stretch from resignation to lashing out. Arthur chooses the latter path and allows himself to descend into a madness made manifest by an amoral and sanguinary disregard for human life.

Director Todd Phillips also offers a look at the anomie-filled petri dish that breeds Arthur. Phillips’ Gotham is 1970s New York on crack–garbage strikes, looting, and street violence so rampant that the Joker’s earliest bloody rampages are embraced by rioting anarchists. (Dressing them in Guy Fawkes masks was an inspired choice.) Not since Day of the Locust has an out-of-control mob been so scary.

The Joker is made when Bruce Wayne is still a child, but the Wayne family is not heroic in the film. Thomas Wayne is a disinterested millionaire and political huckster seeking to disguise his need for self-aggrandizement behind hollow promises that he alone can fix Gotham’s problems. (Sound familiar?) Batman fans will recognize that Bruce’s witness of his parents’ murder is where the comic book and movie intersect. DC Comics didn’t harp on what Frank Miller illuminated in The Dark Knight: The Joker is pure id doling out pain and Bruce Wayne/Batman is a conflicted superego dispensing vigilante justice.

Don’t make my mistake; see The Joker if you’ve not already done so. You can, if you wish, ignore the sociological and psychological dimensions and view Arthur simply as the making of a monster. But revel in Joaquin Phoenix’s astonishing performance and in Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Oscar-winning score. Any way you play it, though,The Joker is a dark card.

Rob Weir