By Jake Wilson
JOKER ★★½
MA, 122 minutes
Considering how long Warner Brothers have been mocked for trying to position themselves as the dark and edgy superhero studio, their marketing team must be congratulated for turning the ship around.
Even before its release, audiences have been primed to regard Joker as a serious work of art, especially since it was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Hard to see Joaquin Phoenix's schmuck character in Joker as any kind of future arch-villain.
With equal success, this latest origin story for Batman’s arch-nemesis has been talked up as a dangerous object capable of fuelling the rage of sexually frustrated shut-ins everywhere.
Joker is not a particularly good film, much less an important one. It is, however, an interesting cultural phenomenon: the Venice prize may represent a milestone in the history of taste, implying a new conception of quality cinema.
Whatever its pretensions, this is undeniably a comic-book movie; moreover it’s directed by the brazenly low-brow Todd Phillips, known for a string of wilfully tasteless comedies such as The Hangover.
Phillips says he doesn’t see Joker as a major departure, and it’s clear what he means: he has made a career out of manchild movies and here is another.
The manchild here is a mentally ill sadsack named Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who works as a children’s entertainer, dreams of success as a stand-up comedian and is apparently destined to metamorphose into the Clown Prince of Crime.
The subtext is Phillips’ own aspiration to move up a notch or six in the Hollywood pecking order, which determines many of his choices as director and co-writer.
Todd Phillips has made a career out of manchild movies and here is another.
Gotham City as envisaged here is modelled on the New York of 1970s films like Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver – over-populated, crime-ridden and grimy in a manner that has since become a shorthand for cinematic integrity.
Even more conspicuously, Joker takes many of its plot cues from Martin Scorsese’s prescient 1982 satire The King of Comedy, with Robert De Niro as a nut who idolises yet longs to supplant a talk-show host played by Jerry Lewis.
Arthur similarly looks up to a talk-show host played by De Niro himself, whose authoritative performance is the best thing in the film; a homage to the era when showbusiness as a whole aspired to a respectability it did not quite possess.
But the film pins most of its artistic hopes on Phoenix, playing yet another variant on the established Joaquin Phoenix Character: morose, potentially violent, inarticulate yet with glimmers of sensitivity.
Arthur lives in a decrepit apartment with his ailing, half-crazed mother (Frances Conroy) with whom he has an unhealthily close relationship – exactly like the thuggish anti-hero Phoenix played two years ago in Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here.
Joker takes many of its plot cues from Martin Scorsese’s satire The King of Comedy, which also starred Robert de Niro.
Phoenix is the kind of actor who has to work hard to be uninteresting. But he never manages to make Arthur into a coherent person, partly because it’s hard to see this schmuck as any kind of future arch-villain and partly because the film’s thesis is kept broad and vague; sidestepping the moments where the character might forfeit our sympathy for good.
Ultimately it’s Arthur’s mother who says what we’re all thinking: "Don’t you have to be funny to be a comedian?" The trouble is that Phoenix is not funny – unlike, say, Jack Nicholson, whose shamelessly joyful interpretation of the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman set a standard all successors must be measured against.
Shamelessness is usually funny, whereas shame usually isn’t – at least, not the heavy, inescapable shame which is Phoenix’s stock in trade.
It’s quite a concept: a Joker who doesn’t know how to tell a joke and never learns. The punchline, if there is one, might have something to do with the character’s difficult relation to conventional, straight masculinity.
When Arthur dons full clown make-up at the climax, his fey persona suggests a drag queen. Elsewhere he registers as virtually asexual despite the presence of Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) as his dream girl down the hall.
But this is not the sort of subject-matter Phillips knows how to handle – and it's telling too that he seems to have forgotten that The King of Comedy contains not two remarkable performances but three. A 2019 remake with no equivalent to Sandra Bernhard? Seriously, you’ve got to be kidding.