Year Released: 2019
Directed by: Todd Phillips
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Frances Conroy, Zazie Beetz, Robert De Niro
(R, 122 min.)
Genre: Action and Adventure, Drama, Mystery and Suspense

Academy Award: Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix

“What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?” –Arthur Fleck (Joker 2019)

Joaquin Phoenix well deserves his Oscar for his groundbreaking performance in this stand-alone Joker film. If you, like Different Drummer, have sworn off comic book films, make an exception here.

But first a summary:

This psychological thriller is based on the DC Comics character Joker, directed and co-written by Todd Phillips. The story follows Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a failed stand-up comedian who is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City.

Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study.” –Two Geeks Who Eat

We already knew that Joaquin Phoenix could act, as his performance with Phillip Seymour Hoffman in 2012’s The Master showed us, but here Phoenix is center stage, recreating a loser not too unlike the one he played in that film. In The Master Phoenix played Freddie Quell, a returning WWII sailor flirting with the abyss.

He impressed Different Drummer then as now:

There is an unspoken eloquence in the haunted eyes and furrowed brow, the way he walks with sunken chest and arms hooked behind his back, like a broken-winged crow pacing the pavement for that forsaken crumb or glittery wrapper.

In Joker we see those same facial expressions and eloquent body language. The painted smile is the only one we ever see on Arthur’s face. Sunken chest and hunched shoulders only lighten up when he is in his clown uniform or when he dances a sad ballet, arms again almost birdlike. But he never leaves the ground, unless it is behind someone’s fist.

Freddie in The Master had a mentally ill mother as does Joker’s Arthur Fleck, but Joker goes a bit further with Arthur. At first we are told that his mental problems, most notably his uncontrollable laughing at inappropriate times, is part of a neurological condition. He even has a laminated card he hands to people to explain it. But what caused this condition? We and Arthur become less and less sure as the film progresses.

Which brings up the reason this film transcends its comic book roots and almost becomes literary. (I never thought I would be saying that about a film by Todd Phillips, the director, writer, and producer of the infamous Hangover trilogy. )

However, Joker evokes some of the most critical themes of literature – Who am I and/or who is my father? – recalling ancient Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex and even the story of Christ.

Not to mention a prevalent theme evoked by American playwrights – the fine line between truth and illusion explored by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee in such plays as The Iceman Cometh, The Glass Menagerie, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“Truth and illusion, George; you don’t know the difference,” Martha famously says to her husband in Albee’s play.

“No, but we must carry on as though we did,” George replies.

Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) in his role as Joker seems to take George’s admonition to heart. And like the cult leader he either becomes or imagines – there is a case for each – Arthur brings us right along with him into his fantasies, fooling us as the supremely unreliable narrator that he is.

We see this most notably in his relationship with his neighbor Sophie, (Zazie Beetz) and late night comedian Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). In Arthur’s awkward ride in the elevator with Sophie and her daughter, he is almost mute, but later on, he sweeps her off her feet, and they become a couple.

Watching Murray Franklin’s show with his mother on the small television in their shabby apartment, we see the host single Arthur out and praise him for taking care of his mother, saying, “If I had a son, I would like him to be just like you.”

Of course, the real Arthur is not sitting in the studio, but is at home with his mother watching the show. Maybe this was filmed earlier, we think at first, but that naïve notion is soon dispelled.

Those two fantasies are easily and quite clearly disputed by later footage in the film, but other action only nags at us, particularly after the jarring events near the end of the film.

It is after trying to reconcile what is true and what is imagined that one might be reminded of Tom Stoppard’s Play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, retelling Hamlet from the viewpoint of two simple blokes that get caught up in Hamlet’s vortex of self-destruction.

One might even say that the whole Joker identity is a sort of McGuffin, “an object that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.” As Richard Newby recounts,

Joker isn't based on any comic book storyline, and its comic book characters are few and far between. There are no narrative ties between this Joker and the one we've watched Batman beat into the pavement time and again. Yet there is a thematic one. Arthur Fleck's downward spiral is taken seriously but with a certain irreverence that's only a gutter removed from the real world and comic world that border it like funny book panels.

In fact, when we notice the title is Joker not The Joker, we may even begin to wonder if Arthur is actually the one who later becomes Bruce Wayne/Batman’s nemesis. Or may he, indeed, actually be Wayne’s half brother?

And what about all the other events in the film? Did they actually happen, or are we just being conned by the very imaginative manipulator Arthur into buying into his phony narrative where all his enemies are humiliated and he is lauded. Are all those clown-masked figures hailing him as their leader really there? Is that really Arthur who, with his arms outstretched Christ-like, falls onto the hood of a car?

Such is the fantastic web that director Todd Phillips weaves even as he tries to deny it. This, like his Hangover heroes, is just a guy who makes a few bad decisions to trigger the whirlwind? Not buying it.

So, whether or not he realizes it, Phillips is saying so much more. Fall under his and Joaquin Phoenix’s spell for 2 hours of film fantasy. You won’t regret it.

–Kathy Borich
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Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

Part of what intensifies Joker is the haunting ironic soundtrack:

Smile though your heart is aching
Smile even though it's breaking

croons Jimmy Durante as we watch Arthur beaten and abused in his job as a clown.

Then when vile and drunken boors on the subway began to take him down, they sing an off key rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

Later on, when Joker is liberated from his attempts to be good, we hear a bold Frank Sinatra, belting out “That’s Life.”

Different Drummer has chosen a wonderful cocktail named “Smile Though Your Heart is Aching” to go with this film.

As the creators of this recipe, 2 Geeks Who Eat.com, tell us,

The Smile Though Your Heart is Aching Cocktail is a riff on the classic Bijou Cocktail. Instead of using sweet vermouth we decided to go with Lilet Blanc. This gave us a better color theme as well as a more interesting flavor. If you aren’t able to find AZ Bitters Lab Orange Sunshine Bitters, standard orange bitters will work.

Drink up. After this film experience, you are going to need a little attitude adjustment.