In the film Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, who lives in Gotham City with his mother, barely holding down a job as a clown for hire. He dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian, looking up to talk-show host Murray Franklin, played by Robert De Niro. After suffering one humiliation and defeat after another, Arthur begins to lash out with violence, inadvertently becoming an underground hero to a city being torn apart by social and economic unrest.
The film nods toward the same enigmatically unnerving qualities as Phillips’ two main acknowledged influences, the Martin Scorsese films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
For a conversation on The Times’ entertainment podcast The Reel, Justin Chang, Sonaiya Kelley, Glenn Whipp and Mark Olsen sat down earlier this week to talk about the movie. What follows is a condensed edit of their conversation.
OLSEN: Justin, in your review you referred to the movie’s “prestige pulp ambitions.” What did you mean by that?
CHANG: “Prestige pulp” is something that you could say even about Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. And Joker, I think, plays like it wants to have the same sensibility but just shorter, nastier, a lot more nihilistic and brutal. And of course because it’s from the perspective of the Joker himself, here you are just up close and personal with Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker for two hours. It is done in a very gritty, realistic style by Todd Phillips, which is new for him.
And the fact that Joker premiered at major international film festivals and won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and then went on to play Toronto. These are prestige launchpads. This is the studio Warner Brothers’ very shrewd way of positioning the movie as something that is more artistically substantial than the blockbuster comic book movie norm.
WHIPP: It’s a very cynical, glib treatment of societal malaise. It’s not nearly as edgy or as nervy as it thinks it is. So you kind of go through this film waiting for something interesting to happen and it kind of does. It takes about an hour and a half for it to finally happen and this performance by Joaquin Phoenix, there’s some real wacky pleasures in watching it but it’s also just kind of exhausting and very much lacking in dimension. It just keeps hitting the same note over and over but just louder and louder until it explodes at the end. And there’s been so much written and spoken, and we’re contributing to that right now, that I wonder when people see it in theatres what the response will be. Will it be kind of deflating like, “Is that all there is?”
OLSEN: Sonaiya, you’re a fan of superhero movies generally and this film uses the character of the Joker but it’s a new story outside of the sort of official canon. How did you feel about its relationship to its superhero-ness?
KELLEY: I did not care about this movie whatsoever going into it. I was like, “This is DC so let’s manage our expectations a little bit.” And so when I got there I was actually blown away. But it was relentlessly dark and I did spend the entire time checking the exits of the theatres because I thought someone was going to come in and try to kill us. But that said, I enjoyed the movie; I thought that Joaquin did an amazing job. I thought the script did service to the character because you can’t do a Joker movie and not go dark. That character is an iconic villain for a reason.
OLSEN: Obviously we are the kind of people who are just steeped in the discourse around a movie like Joker. Do you think general audiences are going to be taking all this meta-textual worry into the theatre with them?
CHANG: I wonder how much of all that meta-textual stuff most moviegoers will even have read or absorbed. But I do think that when you have a well-known intellectual property that is given a sort of grown-up spin, and clearly we have a wide range of opinion on Joker, but the mere fact that some ambition and some seriousness — even if it’s just self-seriousness — is brought to bear, I think the audience usually responds to that. And when you wed that seriousness with extreme violence as well, all the more so.
There’s been so much talk, of course, about does this movie have the potential to sow seeds of violence? Is it going to incite real-life violence? And you know it’s like anything can incite anything, I don’t even want to go down that path. My mindset is that I think we all feel very strongly on the rights of artists and the pitfalls of censorship. I have to say, though, that given just the anxiety around this movie I have never been more eager for something to just be in and out of theatres as quickly as possible. Make its box office millions and be done. And of course, though, I think the movie is actually going to be in theatres for a while.
OLSEN: Glenn, what do you think it is about this movie, about Joker, that’s inspiring these levels of seemingly genuine cultural anxiety and fear even before the movie is even out?
WHIPP: Well, I wonder if it’s a bit peculiar to America. The film is opening internationally this weekend, too, and are they having these kinds of fears in other countries? What does that say specifically about the United States that you would be in a movie theatre looking for the exit? I don’t think that’s true in other countries. I don’t think I need to say it, we’re in just a much more violent country. And this movie certainly leans into that.
OLSEN: I think it’s also that there is this single lonely man who eventually acts out, is violent himself, but that violence then becomes a match that sets off something bigger. And because of who some of his early victims are, he sets off this wave of discontent with economic inequality. In the movie a newspaper headline reads, Kill the Rich.
WHIPP: It doesn’t really handle those societal issues in any kind of meaningful way. I don’t think that this movie is going to inspire violence because of its intellectual depth, because it doesn’t have any. I really feel like Todd Phillips made this movie to be a provocative piece but I don’t feel like there’s really any kind of dimension to it.
CHANG: I would agree with Glenn that I do think its treatment of those issues is pretty glib. It’s sort of telegraphing these ideas rather than really developing them. And this was especially apparent to me on the second viewing from which I still have some admiration for the film and for Phoenix’s performance even though it’s far from my favourite performance of his. He does tortured souls better than anyone and I much prefer his performances in The Master and You Were Never Really Here, which were a lot more surprising.
But to get back to the Kill the Rich subtext and these ideas, in some ways maybe people are inclined to give them a bit too much credit even for having ideas or for gesturing toward them. I don’t think the movie does too much more than gesture toward them. I think what the perceived danger of this movie is that it expresses a measure of sympathy for someone who seems to fit the mould of an incel or of the kind of person who we see again and again commits mass shootings — the lonely, mentally troubled, white male misfit. This movie elicits your pity and your terror.
Does it expect you to be jumping out of your seat and applauding when the Joker is committing his violent acts or when he is sort of voguing on the steps of Gotham City? Or these sort of slo-mo dance sequences where he is embracing his newfound calling as a homicidal maniac? A lot of people may have different answers to that. To me the movie is something of a giant Rorschach blot. Some people will see those scenes as a glorification. I personally do not.
I can only judge my own reaction, which is that I felt pity for this man, partly because he’s played by Joaquin Phoenix and my heart kind of breaks for Joaquin Phoenix whenever I see him on the screen. He is that good at humanising characters who are hard to love. But I also just recoiled from this character and I was completely repelled by it too. - Los Angeles Times/TNS