Film Review - Joker (15)

I used to think my life was a tragedy...

News that director Todd Phillips was delivering a new take on DC Comics' most notorious super-villain prompted questions as to the guy's wisdom. A decade has passed since Heath Ledger's performance in the role, but the impression he made as Gotham's most wanted is indelible. Why go there again, less than a cinematic generation down the line? Any reservations, however, have been wiped away by a radical reworking of the story and one stunning reinterpretation of the character. 

Joaquin Phoenix is Arthur Fleck - a failing professional clown and would-be stand-up comedian in early 1980s Gotham City. Living with his ailing mother (Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy), he's an isolated man with a medical condition that causes him to laugh compulsively, and not necessarily when anything humorous is going on around him. His boss is worse than unsympathetic, he's a target in his job for street gangs and the therapy he so desperately needs is in danger of being withdrawn. Meanwhile around him the city is seething with social unrest, garbage mounting up as strike action bites. Then one freak event changes Arthur's life - and that of Gotham itself - forever. This unlikliest of characters, one dislocated from the rest of society, could turn out to be the city's destiny.

Director Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver (8 Mile, The Fighter) make two choices that provide Joker with its own life and dark heart. First is the decision to focus on the villain origin story; what could have felt empty due to the absence of a caped nemesis, turns out to be an intricate and fascinating character study, plotting one lost soul's drift into deranged criminality beat by beat. Expect none of The Dark Knight's blockbuster set-pieces. This is something much more intimate, while no less compelling.

The other key choice is to mirror the early films of Martin Scorsese, namely Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. The similarities would be apparent even if the makers hadn't openly name-checked their inspirations. Joker is in effect a merging of those two Robert De Niro-centric movies, with both stories reimagined in terms of the super-villain genesis tale. Gotham, while sporting some classic loactions from the comics, is as much New York circa early-80s, while De Niro himself features splendidly as Murray Franklin, an old-school talk-show host reminiscent of the one played by Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy. Phillips' direction substitutes grit for slickness and graininess for gloss, and even though Arthur's world sometimes bursts into clownish primary colour, the overall tone is dark. Like - really dark, a feeling deepened by Hildur (Chernobyl) Guonadottir's dread-summoning score.

Crucial to this tale is Phoenix's Arthur. It's an utterly immersive performance that only begins with the actor's emaciated frame (he gets shockingly skinny for the role, like he got uncomfortably heavy-set in You Were Never Really Here). The pre-Joker Fleck is a broken and abused creation, his humanity gradually being twisted into something self-deluding and dangerous by a society that doesn't give a damn about him. It's a mesmerisingly nuanced performance - heartbreaking and unsettling, played out in obsessive physical detail and full of dark humour, the kind where the laughter dies in your throat as the character's psyche fragments before your eyes. Your response to Arthur's progression into Joker-dom (if it's anything like mine) will be... complicated. You'll want poor Arthur to have his moment - but not necessarily the kind that transpires.

Joker is a savage, cynical and darkly comical movie, which like the aforementioned Scorsese titles observes a wince-inducing anti-hero in a world that courts pychosis and sociopathy. Fears that the film might incite violence miss the point, as do comments that it lacks the depth of its two real-world movie antecedants. Arthur's tragic story delves into mental illness and the consequences when its sufferers are marginalised and ignored. It also points out what we've already been learning - that the disenfranchised in a greedy society will look to anyone, no matter how deranged, when they feel they're running out of options. Now that's not bad from the director who brought you all three movies in the Hangover trilogy. Put on an impressed face - if not a happy one.

Gut Reaction: Disturbed, excruciatingly entertained and weirdly exhilerated at one point. Plus awed throughout by Phoenix's genius, awards-baiting performance.

Memorable Moment: Slow-mo steps-descent - he's got the moves like Joker.

Ed's Verdict: 9/10. Drawing as much on classic urban drama as comic book tropes, Joker is a unique one-off - a disquieting portrait of one man's slow evolution into psychopathic insanity. It just so happens that the psychopath in question is a clown.