Ever since people started seeing “Joker” months ago the stories were that Joaquin Phoenix put on a hell of a performance and that the movie was something special. But once the “professional” critics started yapping about it within the last few days, many of them started trashing it, with “cultural experts” downplaying it. It would embolden incels to go violent; watch out for nuts with AR-15’s; toxic masculinity; blah, blah, blah. It seemed odd that a movie that seemed to have everything going for it would set off a noticeable subset of the critic community.
I saw it today. My own review: it’s a damned fine flick. It’s not really a comic book movie, but more like a 1970’s New York crime movie. Phoenix Play Arthur Fleck, a quite realistic sort of character… just one with some serious mental health issues. not criminally insane, just… disturbed. Through the course of the movie things keep going wrong for him; sometimes due to his own bad decisions, sometimes due to his psychological conditions, and many times due to external events and situations which he has little to no control over. As a result, he slowly transforms into the Joker.
Fleck has no political motives for his actions. He’s just a screwed up guy in a screwed up world. But…
Through no intention of his own, Fleck becomes the inspiration for a political movement. People wear clown masks, protest in the streets and in the end carry out acts of violence… not quite in his name, but with him as a figurehead. In the end, Joker becomes a Hero Of The Masses. And who are these masses? Essentially… Antifa, or the Democratic Socialists, the generalized far left. The protestors explicitly want to “kill the rich.” They wave around signs saying “RESIST!” Democrats and Republicans, capitalism and Socialism, these labels are not stated…but they’re implied. A leftist protest movement rallies around a delusional violent murderer.
Suddenly, the critic community’s ambivalence about this movie comes into focus.
Beyond that: Phoenix does not present as entertaining a Joker as Heath Ledger did. Arthur Fleck is, to be blunt, a damned depressing guy. But “Joker” only really comes along as such in the last few minutes of the movie; if there is a sequel, *then* Phoenix could potentially let loose a full-on nonstop Jokeriffic extravaganza of unhinged entertainment. But where Ledger was watchably wacky in all his scenes, he was really only in “The Dark Knight” for a matter of minutes. Phoenix is essentially the whole freakin’ movie. Offhand I can recall only one scene that he wasn’t in. It’s all Phoenix, all the time, and he does a fantastic job of depicting a mentally ill sadsack in one of the worst places imaginable: Gotham City (i.e New York City) in the late seventies or early eighties (the date didn’t seem to be stated explicitly, but at the end of the movie we see a family emerge from a theater showing “Zorro, the Gay Blade” which came out in 1981). Loaded with garbage strikes and street crime and slums and drugs and porn theaters and overpopulation and “super rats,” it’s a place that would drive healthy people to madness.