2 out of 5 musical numbers (has some good moments but is overall bad)
I would like to apologize to the Mean Girls musical from earlier this year. While I still stand by everything I said in that review, the film wasn’t embarrassed to be a musical and the song numbers progressed the plot, informed the characters, and had some degree of choreography involved. I say all this because Joker: Folie A Deux, a sequel to 2019’s perplexing billion-dollar hit Joker, is also a musical, yet it’s made by people who have no idea why musicals are appealing or how to execute them properly. From a leading man who couldn’t hold a tune if his life depended on it to bland staging of songs whose absence wouldn’t affect anything, this was the most bizarrely frustrating experience I’ve had in a theater this year. While it’s sprinkled with good ideas and a good performance from Lady Gaga, Joker: Folie A Deux is a fascinating enigma of the silver screen whose most intriguing aspect is that it exists in this state at all.
Following the first movie, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is locked up in Arkham Asylum with abusive guards and awaiting his homicide trial. His lawyer (Catherine Keener) wants to spin it that Arthur has an alternate personality called Joker that committed the murders, while the city’s DA blames him entirely and is holding the death penalty over his head. Despite all this, Arthur falls head-over-heals for fellow inmate Lee Quinzell (Lady Gaga making the most of a seriously underwritten character), who idolizes his Joker persona. As his trial commences and an anxious city watching, Arthur hopes he and Lee can run off into the sunset together while deciding whether to embrace his inner Clown. Oh yeah, there are also musical numbers laced throughout these events.
Joker: Folie A Deux is one of the single strangest experiences I’ve had in a theater this year. Rarely does a film open and immediately have me onboard like this does only to slowly, but surely lead me to jump ship the longer it goes on. To give the film its blood-drenched flowers up front, the ideas it prods at are solid: how much a mentally ill person’s actions can be blamed on them vs their mental illness (and how others respond to them), media frenzies around murder cases unintentionally lionizing the perpetrators in the public eye, and how some people become overly infatuated with these killers Could have made for something great, but are explored with the depth and nuance of your average Teletubbies episode. Lady Gaga gives the strongest performance in the film as Lee and, as expected, has the best singing voice of our mad lovers. I hope she can put her talent to films that are as strong as she is in the future, but this one would be far worse without her.
Unfortunately, that’s where the roses stop for Joker: Folie A Deux. For starters, the film commits the cardinal sin of a musical by having a leading man who simply cannot sing. Joaquin Phoenix may be acclaimed for his dramatic work in smaller arthouse films, but I’d sincerely pay to hear Pierce Brosnan, Russell Crowe, or Gerard Butler perform full concerts before having to hear Phoenix embrace his inner Disney Princess ever again. Singing and acting simultaneously is hard, but it’s unacceptable for your lead actor in a musical not to be able to sing decently. The musical numbers themselves are a mixed bag, some being alright and others unintentionally funny in their placement, but they rarely convey anything about the characters that hasn’t been shown already. The central romance is also unengaging beyond the promising first meeting, with virtually every scene between our lovers boiling down to “I love you babe. Let’s be crazy together”. Me and my audience were laughing at the repetitive nature of their encounters, rendering the intended emotional conclusion mute. The trial segment of the movie is also so ridiculous (complete with Phoenix seemingly channeling Keanu Reeves’ accent from The Devil’s Advocate, a far better film) that I wondered if it was intentionally comical. No judge in the history of the law would allow anything that happens in this courtroom and the film’s continued insistence at a dour tone clashes with its absurdity. Lastly, the film is unable to decide how it wants to view Arthur as a character. Sympathy? Disgust? Pity? I don’t know, and frankly I didn’t care by the end.
Director and co-writer Todd Philips has said this is his final bow with the Joker character, and while it is a tad better than last time thanks to Gaga, her voice, and me feeling slightly warmer to Arthur early on, the baffling missteps eventually had me waiting out the clock so I could go home, write this review, and bid ado to this self-indulgent duology. Joker Folie A Deux tramples over its good ideas with surface-level exploration, an unconvincing love story, and a lead with less vocal prowess than a child belting out “Let it Go” in the back seat. To end positively, I realized at the counter that I’d accrued enough points so that my ticket and concessions only cost $10.78, and I can think of no other film this year, good or bad, for which I’m happy to have only spent $10.78. Based on its dismal box office, follow most of the rest of the world and Skip It.
Rated R for a Ridiculous Waste of Gaga