I'm not convinced that Joker: Folie à Deux is truly as a bad movie as a lot of people on Rotten Tomatoes seem to think it is. Though it wasn't the movie Catherine and I had hoped to see, I think that director Todd Phillips and his cast aren't getting enough credit for what they tried to do with the material. The writing and cinematography are solid; I didn't find anything objectionable in either. Lady Gaga practically steals the show as Lee Quinzel, Joaquin Phoenix still sells his version of the Joker as a wannabe Travis Bickle facing the music, and the supporting cast all play their parts well.
The problem exists between chair and screen. I was hoping for more of a Bonnie & Clyde romp based on the trailer, but Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix) was never capable of being a Clyde Barrow, and my expectation is doubtless influenced by DC's comics and animated adaptations where the Joker is voiced by Mark Hamill. Expect spoilers after the trailer...
I can't help but think that people aren't ready to accept that a natural-born loser like Arthur Fleck might have been capable of murdering several people in fits of rage while wearing clown makeup, but couldn't bear the weight of the the Joker persona that people projected on him afterward.
I think it's telling that with the exception of the Arthur and Lee's escape attempt, most of the musical numbers in which Arthur is the Joker are flights of fantasy on Arthur's part. Even if he wants to be the Joker, he can't keep up the act for long. The character is too big for him, and his attempt to be his own attorney proves that not only does he have a fool for a client, but that he can only truly be the Joker when he's got a pistol and is blowing people's heads off. Even then, he's not the "Clown Prince of Crime" that fans of the comics know and love to hate. He's still just a pathetic little man with a gun cracking jokes that can't even get an obligatory laugh out of his mother — who he smothered after she smothered him (and worse) for decades, a fitting revenge that as usual he enacted on impulse.
Perhaps if he had been able to find a pistol hidden away in the men's room a la Jacques Mesrine, but Arthur Fleck doesn't have the allies, the killer instinct, or the sheer verve that one of France's most notorious criminals displayed — except in his Broadway fantasies.
He doesn't have the requisite strength of ego. He doesn't have the intelligence. He couldn't even figure out that Lee Quinzel didn't care for him, but was infatuated with her idea of him until it was too late, and if anything she might be far more dangerous than him by virtue of her cold, calculating nature. It should have been obvious to even him during the number where he played the Sonny Bono to Lee's Cher.
In any case, he's too old to be the Joker that Batman fights; in Joker (2019), Bruce Wayne is only 9 years old. If Fleck had survived the events of Folie à Deux, he'd be in his late 60s or early 70s by the time Wayne is done with his ninja training and ready to become the goddamn Batman. Somebody else would have had to take up the Joker mantle, and there's no shortage of angry, maladjusted loners in Gotham City. Manufacturing such people is practically Gotham's biggest industry, and I can't help but suspect that Thomas Wayne had his finger in that pie, profiting from the malformation of human souls.
As George Carlin once observed, the rich need the unemployable poor. They exist to threaten the working class and middle-class, to keep them obedient and productive lest they join the ranks of the lumpenproletariat they have been taught to fear after decades of propaganda.
Nevertheless, this isn't the Joker from Christopher Nolan's movies. This isn't even Jack Nicholson's Joker in the Tim Burton movie. This Joker seems to be based on the premise of The Killing Joke; all it took was a succession of shitty days for Arthur Fleck to be capable of temporarily embodying the Joker archetype, but that's not him.
He might have sparked the myth, but he was just a man. And not even much of a man by our society's standards, let alone his own as depicted in the films. If anything, the movies are suggesting that even if an incel rises up and starts killing his tormenters, he'll never be anything but an angry, violent loser proving that society was right to reject him.
For some reason, Joker: Folie à Deux reminds me of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Both movies suffer from their branding. The Spirits Within would have been a solid high-concept sf action flick if not for the expectations that come with the Final Fantasy brand — though it also suffered from an audience that didn't know enough about Shinto or James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis to fully understand the story. Todd Phillips' Joker movies likewise suffer from their association with the DC character, though Folie à Deux suffers more from the film to which it is an unnecessary sequel, and it might have helped to read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment first, though Arthur Fleck doesn't have the philosophical depth to be a modern Raskolnikov.
If Arthur Fleck is anything, he's the sort of lowlife whose murders the hard-bitten Baltimore detectives in David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets would have dismissed as "dunkers" where all they have to do is make sure the evidence isn't tainted and due process isn't violated so they can put the bastard away. He's a fundamentally unromantic figure that has had romance thrust upon him because Americans love a bit of showmanship in their criminals.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. Catherine and I got our money's worth, but the theater we frequent sells discounted tickets on Tuesdays so we didn't pay full price. My recommendation is that you rent this, or catch a matinee showing (while sneaking in snacks for a long movie), and decide for yourself. You might want to watch Joker (2019), first, however. Doing so would put Folie à Deux in context.
