I Want My $10 Back - Joker: Folie à Deux
"Boring" doesn't even begin to cover it
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“Choices were made,” I said to my sister after we decided not to see the movie we had intended to see this past Tuesday. While walking into the movie theatre planning to see Saturday Night, moving past a giant poster for Joker: Folie à Deux I say to her “This is what we should be here to see,” referencing our shared disappointment at the critical response to the film. I didn’t think she would come back with the proposal that if a showing of it was starting soon, she’d be up for watching it.
Earlier that day my sister had cancelled a trip she’d been planning with her friends for more than a year. The reality of Hurricane Milton unfortunately forced them to cancel at the last minute, and while she of course feels for those in the hurricane’s path, she was also understandably down in the dumps about a trip she’d put a lot of time, money and effort towards making happen getting cancelled by something out of her control. Going to the movies was meant to cheer her up, though our final choice of what to see did nothing of the sort.
Her “this day can’t get any worse” attitude combined with my curiosity about what could have gone so wrong with Joker: Folie à Deux led us to getting tickets for the 9:15pm showing rather than Saturday Night’s 9pm show.
Choices were definitely made. Wrong choices.
Also, I guess this is where I should say spoilers, but really you should be thanking anyone who spoils this movie for you - because then you can not watch it, saving your money and comfortable in the knowledge that you can skip it.
I Want My $10 Back
A Musical?
I was skeptical when I heard the reports. A musical? Really? And then Lady Gaga said this: “The way that music is used is to really give the characters a way to express what they mean to say because the scene and just the dialogue is not enough.”
That’s her denying that it’s a musical, which confused me even further. Now that I’ve seen the movie though, it very unfortunately is my job to report that it is, very technically, a musical. But it’s not a good one, and it’s also a musical made by someone who absolutely hates musicals.
See, the way that it’s a musical is because characters do sing, as a replacement for dialogue, to express themselves. Though they only use licensed music which also technically makes it a jukebox musical. An even worse crime, arguably.
When Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga start to sing as a replacement for dialogue and a means of expressing their characters state, sometimes they’re singing in a dream sequence, a place that’s removed from the reality of the movie world. Other times, they’re singing fully within the movie’s real world.
The scene that best expresses how this back-and-forth fails is one where Arthur Fleck is singing right at someone who’s interviewing him, and though the interviewer is trying to keep a stern face for the camera, he’s clearly confused. Which is exactly what would happen with anyone, if they were having a regular, talking conversation and one of the people in the conversation started singing.
Fleck is also a murderer, in the eyes of his interviewer, so that he would be singing is clearly off-putting for him, and it has the same impact on the audience. Musicals work because everyone and everything about it buys into the fantasy. They’re a kind of high fantasy that allows for deep, emotional moments paired with bright lights and dancing for days. Removing the key element of everyone buying in, and only having one (or in the case of this movie two) characters living in the fantasy feels like the kind of idea a musical theatre kid turned film student would think is clever.
It’s not - it’s just fucking cringe.
The Boring Part Of The Story
About an hour into the movie, I had a horrible realization. There was still another hour and twenty minutes left.
Whatever compelled writers Todd Phillips, Bob Kane, and Scott Silver to focus on Arthur Fleck’s trial and make some kind of courtroom drama out of it must’ve been something strong to make them think that was a good idea.
It’s like they picked the most boring main conflict possible. Who cares about the trial? Who? What does it matter to the Joker if he’s found to be a murderer or insane? I mean, I get it - the audience watching the movie is the jury, and as the only body privy to the private moments Fleck has throughout the whole film the same question posed in his trial is posed to us, the viewer.
It’s not that fucking deep and the better way to ask that question is to actually have some character development through actions or dialogue that give me, the viewer, a reason to pause. Arthur, or the Joker, doesn’t care about the trial. He doesn’t, so why should I?
The plot doesn’t actually care about it either, since it blows the damn thing up right at the last minute. The only important stakes are what’s important to the Joker, to Arthur Fleck, and besides his newfound relationship with Lady Gaga’s character Harleen or “Lee”, there’s nothing he expresses to really care about. He cares about cigarettes. He cares about himself, his image, and how he’d love it if everyone just treated him like some sort of super star.
The events of the trial don’t challenge him, they don’t poke holes in the fantasy, in fact it only feeds his fantasy. It becomes a new part of it, and frankly I couldn’t be paid to care. I’m just astounded by the boring choice to have a character as complex as the Joker strapped to an attempt at a courtroom drama while the movie also tries to be a bunch of other things that never amount to anything.
Quite literally anything would’ve been more interesting. Get him to break out of Arkham and have him on the run the whole movie. Keep him in Arkham the whole time. Send him to the moon, for all I care. I don’t care what a courtroom has to say when the courts, real or fake, are just a bad joke.
Harleen
Perhaps the greatest offense done by Joker: Folie à Deux is its re-imagining of Harley Quinn, a villain who, like Batman’s own side-kick, outgrew their no.1. The Harley that fans love now is the entire opposite of the Harley that Lady Gaga portrays.
She doesn’t do a bad job of it. The music-artist-turned-actor path is one I’ve always been skeptical of simply based on the precedent set by the many who’ve done it poorly. That’s not Lady Gaga, she gives a strong performance based on the character she’s directed to play.
It just sucks that the character she’s been directed to play is flat as a rug and barely a shadow of the Harley Quinn fans have come to know and love over the years.
She’s the child of an upper class family who was going stir crazy (?) and found some kind of connection in the chaos Arthur Fleck incited as the Joker. She checks herself into Arkham just to get close to Fleck. To get close to the Joker. She’s obsessed with the Joker on a completely different level than the rest of this fans.
And that’s her entire character. She exhibits no real agency beyond doing things that are, in her mind, going to help the Joker and her succeed in their ultimate goal of “building a mountain on a hill,” whatever that means.
For a film that’s focused on two primary characters (and is literally called the “maddnes of two”) it’s odd, to say the least, that one of those two characters is flatter than cardboard.
Gotcha!
The worst joke of the film was yet to come, however. The great twist, the big reveal, was that in fact, this was not a story about the Joker. Or at least, it wasn’t the Joker story we thought it was.
Arthur Fleck alienates his fan base and his Lady Gaga love by admitting that there was no ‘Joker’ in his final defense of himself. It was just him, Arthur, being the Joker, which for some reason is made out to be a lot less enticing.
The Joker portrayed in Phillips two films is instead more of an idea. That anyone has the potential to feel abandoned by society if everyone around them simply makes no effort to reach out to them. The abuse Fleck faced at the hands of his parents simply helped him along the path. What really made him snap was society and its treatment of socially awkward men. So when Arthur Fleck dies at the end of the movie, stabbed by some other inmate who is then pitched as the “real” Joker we’ll eventually see fight Batman - the Joker hasn’t died. You can kill a person, but not an idea. Arthur Fleck died, but the Joker lives on.
Give me a fucking break.
What’s funny about this is that it’s not even a bad twist? In a way it’s actually a kind of cold splash of reality when you consider that the status quo of the modern internet has been bigotry in every corner. Grifters who farm hatred and outrage for clicks and ad revenue are really just Arthur Fleck’s Joker if he didn’t also kill people. Their audiences then are the real emobidement of the chaos that the Joker symbolizes, as a drip feed of content meant to inspire those to hate anyone that might’ve slighted or wronged them does, eventually, lead one or many of those people towards actual violence.
Arthur Fleck is the modern influencer who built their brand on toxicity and then admits it was a lie. The Joker is everyone who believes him, and even still believes in his message even after Fleck isn’t even a part of the message.
Does that then make Joker: Folie à Deux a clever elevation of comic book characters and settings? A movie that uses recognizable figures to convey modern problems and challenge its audience to see themselves and reflect?
Maybe it would if the rest of the movie was any good. But since the rest of it was shit, and got to this conclusion in arguably the worst way, it just makes it a shitty ending to a shitty movie.
I was glad when Arthur got stabbed because it signaled to me the end of this character, these films. I don’t care that Phillips is done with DC and comic book movies. Good! Go do something else.
If there was going to be any silver lining to find in what ended up being an awful night of movie going, it’s the fact that by heading to the theatre on a Tuesday, I paid a fraction of what I would have paid any other night. My ticket was $10, and my sister found an old coupon for a single admission.
Seeing the movie only cost me $10, and I want it back. More than that I want my time back.
Do yourself a favor, and see quite literally anything else. At the time of publishing, it’s just been announced that Joker: Folie à Deux will be available on streaming services by the end of October, which means it didn’t last in theatres for more than a month. Not surprised.