Joker: Folie a Deux

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix

Before I give the back of my hand to Todd Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux, I will admit that I have a tiny more respect for it than its widely praised predecessor. Like Gremlins 2 and Raimi's Spider-Man 3, this sequel is an auto-critique from a filmmaker who is, at best, ambivalent about his previous success. Pairing the tortured larynx of Joaquin Phoenix with Lady Gaga in musical numbers seems like an attempt to alienate Joker's incel fanboy base. Mission accomplished.

I kind of liked the goofily burlesque musical numbers. Maybe Phillips learned something when he made that Phish documentary. The rest of the film, though, is a disaster. Gaga has no character to play, so no real sense of folie or amour develops between her and Phoenix, just performative energy. Speaking of which, Phoenix is electric. I could rewatch the film just to savor his smoking, he is the Paganini of puffs, but won't because of the vacuousness that surrounds him. Phillips and his-co-writers base the script's structure around Joker's trial, so they can beat us over the head with the theme that Amerika is a cruel, infotainment based junk culture. A beaten and dead horse as far as I am concerned since Kazan's A Face in the Crowd in 1957. Witnessing the trial means we see a tiresome rehash of the first film with no new insights. It also strands an undynamic director visually within a rigid and static mise en scene. Even the car bombing of the courthouse is dull. I did like the performances of Brendon Gleeson and Steve Coogan and Mark Friedberg's production design. However, Joker 2 confirms that Phillips is not cut out to wrestle with weighty themes. He works best exposing the comic idiocies of the American male in his most entertaining films: The Hangover, Starsky and Hutch, Old School, and, Joker's evil twin, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.