Joker

Despite Joaquin Phoenix's efforts, Kino Biff is nonplussed by Joker

Todd Phillips' Joker, a runaway commercial and critical hit of the past year, left me underwhelmed. The acting by Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Frances Conroy, Zazie Beetz and other notables is solid and the art direction by Laura Ballinger is outstanding. Joker looks great and doesn't drag, yet I found Phillips' intent to be facile. We are clued to Phillips' slant from the get go with his choice to use the old Warner's logo from the 70s. The film, with its seamy look and garbage piled high on the streets, seems to be placing its Gotham in the Bronx burning era. Echoes of the era's films haunt Joker: Network, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver and especially The King of Comedy. De Niro's character in Joker even seems to be a mashup of that film's Rupert Pupkin and Joe Franklin. Phillips seeks to show how the real joker of our present age's roots are in the dawn of the Reagan era, where a Thermidorian reaction to urban squalor and communitarian values ushered in an age of unbridled capitalism whose personification is our current leader.

In general, I see nothing wrong with using a comic book character's back story to criticize Trump and our selfish elites. However, in order to do so, Joker contorts itself like a pretzel to make the title character sympathetic. Mental illness is raised as an issue, kind of, but Phillips drops it like a hot potato as soon as Joker slaps on his makeup and starts dealing death to the wicked 1%. Since two of the people killed by the proletariat mob he incites are Bruce Wayne's parents, the blueprint of future sequels is set. Phillips provides an iconic moment for Phoenix by having him dance on a staircase to Gary Glitter, but for most of Joker, Phillips is content to shoot fish in a barrel. The white whale of Trump is a tempting target, but, in Joker, Phillips does little more than express Hollywood's revulsion towards him.