Review: Joker: Folie à Deux

The problem here isn’t that Folie à Deux betrays the first Joker. The first movie was clear about Arthur Fleck’s importance being a laughable self-delusion. Most likely a lot of fans of the first movie are uncomfortable with Folie à Deux because it’s not actually very different from Joker. Like Harleen Quinzel tells Arthur Fleck, “let’s give the people what they want.”

But Folie à Deux doesn’t give the people what they want. It doesn’t even give them what they fucking deserve. Hell, it doesn’t even give those of us who were cautiously looking forward to a Joker musical with Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn the pleasures of, well, that. It’s hard to tell if Todd Phillips thought he was giving anything to anybody, except a two-and-a-half-hour handjob to Joaquin Phoenix. And if Phoenix’s idea of a good time is starving himself and showing his protruding ribs on film, well, good luck to him. His narcissistic wet dream bombing is what he deserves after walking out on Todd Haynes and company five days before shooting was supposed to begin.

The nerds ranting about Joker: Folie à Deux are angry for the wrong reasons. They can see this is a bad movie, but they hate it for emphasizing the subtext of the first movie. Joker‘s ultimate flaw was that, despite its 20-odd minutes of excellence, it’s not about much more than the misery of this one guy. It had moments of genius — the talk show scene is an all-timer — but its critique of neoliberalism and the destruction of support systems really boil down to “this guy’s life sucks.” Joker took on the trappings of Taxi Driver, a nightmare about the monsters that the United States creates abroad and unleashes on American streets, and used them to say “man, crazy dudes sure have it hard, don’t they?” while painting mental illness and violence as the children of violent and unstable women.

I don’t hate Joker. It succeeds at being something that I appreciated more five years ago than I do now. And Folie à Deux mostly follows in its footsteps, serving as a functional companion piece to that movie. Arthur Fleck remains a symptom of a sick world. Gotham is still a cracked reflection of Robert Moses’ New York. There are moments of cleverness in the mix. But everything that was ugly about the first movie gets dialed up to 11 here. I walked out of the theater feeling nauseous and angry, like I’d been complicit in something evil. For all of Joker‘s problems, that wasn’t my experience of it.

Unlike its predecessor, Folie à Deux doesn’t make overtures at being about interesting things after its halfway mark. Early on, there are dalliances with Joker being a sick media creation by a diseased news and culture industry. There are a few genuine laughs in here. The Warner Bros-style cartoon that opens the movie is fun. And the first time Arthur Fleck burst into song, I started cackling with delight — an effect I believe was wholly intended by the movie.…

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