Joker: Folie à Deux is a movie horrified by its predecessor, horrified by its success, its maddening cowardice to pick a lane, its public misinterpretation forged into perverse celebration of a lunatic with a bone to pick.
Todd Phillips is a provocateur, for better or worse, someone who took one of the most successful comedies of all time in The Hangover and spun up a sequel so grotesque in its repetition and shocking in its heightened misfortunes that you almost have to admire its commitment to the bit.
Rather than dig his heels in on the half-baked foot-stomping in 2019’s Joker, Phillips sets that film ablaze to send a message. The original played like a petulant rant about how Arthur Fleck’s descent into madness is our fault, about our society incubating wackos to the point of violent release.
While, blessedly, no harm seemed to come from the film in an outward way, the wrong crowd turned Phillips’ take on the Joker into some sort of twisted folk hero for frenzied times. Completely missing the pristine nuance of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, Joker felt like such a broad reimagining of those classics with a ghastly reliance on intellectual property to justify its existence. The joke lacked a meaningful punchline.
However, whereas that film is beloved and feared, an unintentional balm for the put-upon and a hacky warning to the rest of us, Joker: Folie à Deux begs you to hate it. Phillip’s sequel is a passionate and antagonistic disowning of a billion-dollar Oscar winner that broke through the zeitgeist and etched its place in comic book movie history. Rather than push all the chips in on that movie’s outward rage, Phillips turns the table on expectation by pointing the cannon back at his movie. Here, no one can walk away feeling like Joaquin Phoenix’s Fleck is some sort of smiling savior for the broken, the beaten and the damned.
Instead, Phillips paints a pathetic portrait of a man who justified his atrocities with “having a bad day” and a gross sense of entitlement for the world’s unbridled attention. It’s not that Fleck doesn’t deserve your inherent sympathy for having a rough go of things, but he sure doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt for unleashing a violent movement that nearly turned his city upside down. It’s not fair to suggest Phillips wanted his first film to burst through the screen as some sort of anarchistic manifesto, but its clumsy assembly invited that kind of devout following.
Joker wasn’t deft enough to balance its sympathy for Fleck with the character’s narcissism and naivety. You were left with annoying ambiguity, a film comfortable with burning it all down and making everybody else responsible except the guy in the clown makeup. After all, he was just a dog chasing cars, right? It’s not his fault if he catches one and isn’t sure what to do with it.
In a clever reversal of fortune, Joker: Folie à Deux knocks Fleck back down to size and isn’t afraid to call him out for the sad-sack schmuck he is. Whereas the first film had its most fun when it just devoted itself to the shock value with an understanding the audience would recognize dark comedy, this film’s entire ethos is provocation, provocation, provocation.
Whether you find it humorous or horrible that Phillips turns the Joker into Gene Kelly and the sequel into a head-over-heels MGM musical/prison-courtroom procedural as a means to troll those expecting a triumphant return for the Clown Prince of Crime is up to you. Tricking your audience via the Tom Green method of burning studio money as Dadaist disaster art only works as far as the disrespectful vision is willing to go to offend the audience. Phillips’ film isn’t in poor taste as much as it’s actively trying to leave a poor taste in certain people’s mouths.
In Joker: Folie à Deux, Phillips dresses down the actions from the first film, highlighting the human toll of Fleck’s violent spree. He uses new cinema to disempower old cinema, defanging the very bite that Joker left a half decade ago. The biggest problem with Joker is that it was dumb, regurgitating the same old “our society has some problems!” theming that’s been around for decades. It was as obvious as it was disconcerting, and it had been handled to much greater effect in the films it was homaging. It was empty and far too unwilling to hold its main character accountable for his actions.
Joker: Folie à Deux reverses that so bracingly that it’s designed to alienate the very audience it attracts. The original film’s admirers may feel insulted that the sequel holds them in such contempt, that it basically makes the biggest addition (Lady Gaga’s pitch-perfect version of Harley Quinn) an unabashed caricature of toxic fandom who exploits Fleck for the moron he is. Those who couldn’t stand the first one may walk out wondering what the point of sitting through two hours of Phillips sticking his middle finger up at a movie they already didn’t enjoy in the first place. Fans of Broadway musicals may just throw their hands up to know that the format is utilized in part to tick off people who had no idea it was a musical.
However, the gumption for Phillips to follow through with this polarizing of a vision deserves commendation. Most people are going to hate this film, and that’s alright. Those who appreciate what Phillips pulls off here will find a far more gripping performance from Phillips, a striking moral clarity that feels cathartic for the first film’s thematic fumbling, a richer use of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting score and Lawrence Sher’s crisp cinematography of beautiful ruin. Phillips gets much close here to doing what Scorsese did with Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin with Fleck than he ever did with Joker, finally allowing the acid to drip on the lead’s forehead instead of from his tormented tongue.
No better moment in the film sums up its righteous rug-pulling than when Leigh Gill takes the stand in the courtroom drama as Gary Puddles, the dwarf clown who Arthur spares in the first film because he was nice.
Rather than continue to treat Fleck’s sparing as some sort of strange act of kindness, Gill delivers the fatal blow to the first film’s unchecked zeal by highlighting why Fleck’s actions were so horrid, the absolute wrong way to go about dealing with your pain and humiliation.
It’s one of the great moments of acting this year for both Gill and Phoenix, whose showboating to impress all of his nasty followers (Gaga included) in the courthouse audience fades to a holy humbling that shakes the Earth beneath Fleck’s feet and convicts the clown more than any jury could.
By the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, you may feel as Fleck does, completely defeated by a rigorous prosecution of a filmmaker who seems very detested by his original creation and wants to finally come out and say a lot of this really is the Joker’s fault. Maybe some people will admit that their fanatic flocking to the Flecks in our world ins’t the best approach, as this film does operate ever so carefully as a treatise about how disgusting our societal obsession with true crime and its most malevolent operators is. Maybe you’ll wonder if this was all just a big joke, and we’re the punchline for sitting through it all on two separate occasions over the last five years.
However, maybe you won’t deny Phillips’ bold sequel, one that almost feels like a spiritual successor to Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Finally, we get another sequel with so much fascinating meta-commentary about the film it follows, the state of movies and the state of our world as a whole. Whether you find that riveting or vomit-inducing is up to you. If you’re in the former category, you are in for one of the most thrilling studio blockbusters in some time. If you’re not, well, that’s life.
[lawrence-auto-related count=3 category=190]