Joker: Folie à Doo Doo
When hack filmmaker Todd Phillips announced that the sequel to the billion-dollar blockbuster Joker would be a musical starring Lady Gaga, many found themselves bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. And now that Warner Bros.’ most recent bowel movement is splashed across a cineplex screen near you, how did it turn out? If you asked the tens of people in the IMAX screening who gradually walked out with each musical sequence, they’d say pretty badly. But ask me? Resident DC-megafan who also happens to love musicals? I’d say that Joker: Folie à Deux is a wonderfully grotesque monstrosity, a movie that buckles under the weight of all things it’s ashamed of being. It’s a movie that hates existing.
Don’t call Joker a comic book movie because Todd Phillips would really hate that, seemingly only confirmed by his alleged refusal to take James Gunn’s notes or let the movie be seen as a DC production. Before Todd dug through Scorsese’s trash bin like a starving raccoon for baby’s first Taxi Driver, Joker was a part-time gangster, part-time anarchist, part-time Iranian ambassador (don’t ask). So, take away the wacky hijinks, take away Batman, take away the mystery, what’s left to mine? According to Todd, that would be the relationship between Joker and Harley Quinn. Sorry, I meant Lee Quinzell, because Harley Quinn is a silly name. It’s a dynamic that’s become incredibly popular since 2016’s Suicide Squad, a toxic relationship dominated by the Joker. Joker: Folie à Deux takes a different approach however, going the route of a Harley Quinn whose epitaph is “I can make him worse.” Eschewing the usual psychotic psychologist falling in love with her abuser, Harley leans more towards a kid poking a chimpanzee with a stick, waiting to see what it’ll do next.
But that’s it for Lady Gaga’s twist on Harley, who spends most of the movie relegated to the spectator seating in a courtroom. Filling in the gaps to this Joker-Harley dynamic is instead left to the audience's understanding of past iterations, and that’s where the problems arise. Despite how much the film wants to differentiate itself from its source material, this sequel relies so much on the iconography of Batman(Harvey Dent, to Gotham, to Arkham). Yet, it is so uninterested in exploring a new take that the movie ends up relying on that comic book cultural osmosis to fill in the rest. And these classic interpretations of these narrative elements deeply conflict with what the movie is, leaving it fractured.
Also don’t call Joker: Folie à Deux a musical. Todd swears it’s not a musical. It’s just that when the characters can no longer express themselves through words they sing instead. That’s not a musical. The movie is so split on being “a real movie” and a musical so much that it can’t commit to either, leaving an uneven mess. It’s almost a Herculean feat to create a musical starring Lady Gaga that’s so unexciting. Beyond singular moments of colorful sets, this is a musical told in medium shots, unimpressive dancing, and Joaquin Phoenix’s garbled singing that puts Tom Hardy’s Bane to shame. The grit of Todd’s self-seriousness eats away at the fun like a tumor. It’s dull wallpaper afraid to live up to the showmanship that personifies the Joker.
But what makes this sequel so audacious and almost praise-worthy is how much it hates being a sequel to Joker. More than anything else, Joker: Folie à Deux despises the incel culture it helped to fuel, it despises being a symbol. Arthur Fleck has spent these past two movies as a passive protagonist thrust from situation to situation. He exists as a testament to the failings of the mental health system, as the figurehead for an anarchist movement fed up with the wealthy, as an object of Harley’s love, but the truth is all he cared about was killing the kinds of people who had bullied him all his life. He doesn’t want to be the Joker, and he doesn’t want to be a symbol. There is no meaning behind Joker the character or Joker the movie, and its sequel spends its entire trial interrogating the sheer lack of meaning behind it all. It was never meant to go this far. Joker made a billion dollars at the box office and a sequel was inevitable, so Joker: Folie à Deux was forced into existence, kicking and screaming the whole way. In the end, Arthur Fleck’s only moment of agency is disavowing the Joker persona, much like the film disavows itself. And as reward, he gets stabbed and dies in a pool of his own blood by a guy who carves a Glasgow smile into his face like Heath Ledger in a befuddling moment that reeks of corporate IP worship because this movie also hates Arthur Fleck.
Joker: Folie à Deux is the embodiment of shame and hate. It’s a comic book movie allergic to comics, a musical that’s torn out its own vocal chords, a Joker movie that would drown the Clown Prince of Crime in a vat of chemicals if it could. And yet, in that self-hatred, it becomes a fascinating mess, a spectacle of discomfort that dares to spit on the very audience that turned its predecessor into a phenomenon. Whether that's a bold act of defiance or a cinematic cry for help is up to you, but there’s no denying that Joker: Folie à Deux is a must-see.