Joker

 
Please note the purpose of this blog is to discuss established classics that I've never seen. As such, the following is laden with spoilers.

Why So Long?
Well this is cheating isn't it? The film hasn't been out six months, so it's not an established classic by any measure. That said, it was one of the most talked about films of 2019, with some debate even taking place before the film was released - I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, just that it's unusual. What was interesting about the debate was how animated it seemed, for some this was the film of the year, for others it was a dangerous film with a dangerous message. As such, I couldn't really resist sticking my oar in.
 


And? 
You ever make a call on something and wish later on that you had written it down? I had that feeling the second the credits started rolling on this film. Back when the project was announced everyone, myself included, was excited at the idea of this film. That said, I told anyone who would listen (admittedly a short list) that Todd Philips was the weak link in this production and would let the whole show down. Earlier this year I had cause to doubt my prediction when the man who wrote The Hangover gave us Chernobyl; after all, if the writer of those films could bring us something that good, maybe the director could too? The answer is no.

Lets get one thing clear though, this is a good, solid three star film, brought into the realms of the four stars on the back of Joaquin Phoenix's considerable acting shoulders. If you have yet to see it, I recommend it for your next night in. A four-star film is a cracking night's entertainment; you watch it, you enjoy and back in the day, it would probably have a been a shoe-in when you were picking your five for £30 in HMV. But like many of those films you bought under that offer, you've long since moved on. That doesn't mean you don't love the film, you just don't love it enough to watch it again. Remember Sicario? Great film. Watched it since? No, didn't think so. Joker is every bit as good as Sicario.

Which does make the debate over the film a bit of a mystery. For a film to spark such a polarising debate, one would expect it to be either incredibly awful or incredibly good, rather than just grand. Looking back over some of the online articles about the debate after watching the film, its somewhat clearer that the debate was really about something else. An idea encapsulated in what people (on both sides) thought the film was, rather than what it is. The film is not some right-wing training manual for incels, but nor is it some submersive masterpiece spitting in the face of the 1%. 

At its best, Joker is a compelling depiction of the plight of the mentally ill in America. A plight anyone who's spent more than five minutes in an American city is all too aware of. An exaggeration, for the purposes of entertainment, of what happens when a man's support structures are stripped violently from him. In another world this film would probably have been made without the need for the Gotham-city tie in, but giving him green hair and giving some screen time to Bruce Wayne's dad helps with the financing - which is fair enough.

Part of the film's pitch, at least when it got the green light, was how the filmmaker's wanted to imagine what it'd be like if Martin Scorsese ever made a comic book film. In an unrelated series of events, we got the answer to that this year; he won't. And certainly for the first two thirds of the film, that's what we get. Colour, composition and even elements of the plots for Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are lifted wholesale onto the screen. There's nothing wrong with this, Aint Them Bodies Saints is one of my favourite films of the last few years and its essentially Terrence Malick's Badlands with fewer redheads. And one should never have to apologise when such aping results in something this aesthetically pleasing coming to the big screen.

Forgive my laughter, I have a condition.

In fact, its as we enter the final third of the film and Todd Philips abandons his homages to Scorsese that the film loses its way. Realist depictions a la Scorsese's Mean Streets are jettisoned in favour of something a bit more Tarantino-esque. This is not a dig at the hyper-realism of Tarantinoism, it's more that sticking it on with a third of the running time still to go is either going to muddle, or outright change what the message of your film is intended to be. The film's detractors are still wrong, the film stops short of glamorising Joker's actions, instead opting simply to excuse them. Philips, for all his obvious affection and admiration for Scorsese's King of Comedy seems to have missed the masterstroke of that film. The power of that film lay in just how underwhelming Robert Pupkin's stand-up was. He was neither great nor bad, just fine. Looking at his catalogue of work, one is tempted to believe that Philips is not a filmmaker who believes in the power of a message delivered subtlety.

It's unlikely that we'll still be talking about this film in five or ten years, certainly not the manner in which we discuss The Dark Knight, still the high-water mark for mainstream comic book films. What we will still talk about though is Phoenix's performance. We've come to expect Phoenix to be this good, in fact we've seen him play shades of this character before, most notably as Freddie Quell in The Master. But we've never got to see him do it in something so accessible or commercially successful as this, and that in itself is exciting. 

Will You be Watching it Again?
This film is about two years away from a terrestrial television premiere during the festive period. I'll undoubtedly make a point of watching it then.


Has Any Light Been Shone on Some Heretofore Unknown Bit of Pop Culture?
Nope - those steps do look cool though.