Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the huge 2019 hit Joker, is a vague and incoherent bummer of a film that even the dedication and charisma of Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix can’t redeem. But with musical numbers!
Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux. (Warner Bros.)
Vague and incoherent, put together in what seems to be a deliberately anticlimactic design, Joker: Folie à Deux is a slack, overlong bummer of a film with very little in the way of crowd-pleasing genre movie compensations for the notably sparser audiences showing up for it.
The first Todd Phillips Joker film, a violent melodrama packing a surprisingly big emotional punch, was the huge hit of 2019. It followed the narrative arc of the abject, abused, afraid, impoverished, and unfunny would-be comic and born victim Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix in an Oscar-winning performance), who finds a way to express his retaliatory rage with violent brio against a cruelly horrible society. In the sequel, writer-director Phillips pounds away at the bleak chore of returning the character to an even lower state than where he started. He’s really just miserable, abject Arthur in the end. But with musical numbers!
There are about twenty songs performed, or perhaps it just seems that way over the course of two hours and eighteen minutes. They’re sung by Phoenix, who can’t sing, and Lady Gaga, who definitely can but pretends she can’t half the time in the film. In Gotham’s grim reality, see, her Harleen “Lee” Quinzel character, a sociopath obsessed with Joker who meets Arthur as a fellow inmate in Arkham Asylum, sings in a thin, reedy voice. Whereas in the shared fantasy world of the increasingly devoted Joker ’n’ Lee couple, Lee belts out songs in Lady Gaga’s strong showbiz-trained mezzo soprano. We hear “Get Happy,” “That’s Entertainment,” “For Once in My Life,” “That’s Life,” and many other Great American Songbook faves.
Occasionally a number works pretty well. “For Once in My Life” is the best example, performed by Joker and Lee as if they were starring in a 1970s variety show like The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. They break off in the middle of the song to banter with each other in corny, half-hostile ways that expose the actual tensions developing between them before resuming the song that glosses over their differences. Sonny and Cher did the same thing dozens of times, and Sonny couldn’t sing very well either.
Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux. (Warner Bros.)
Lady Gaga continues to be a charismatic on-screen actor, compulsively watchable. She looks great and iconic in her final courtroom Harley Quinn getup, and she gives her all to the role in every scene. Needless to say, Phoenix is all in as well, having once again lost fifty-some pounds to make Arthur as pitifully emaciated a figure as possible, with his jutting collarbone and one oddly misshapen shoulder and each vertebra of his spine practically sticking out through his skin. If the actors’ manifest dedication to their characters could make the difference between a powerful film and the stultifying mess we actually see, they’d have a hit Joker sequel on their hands instead of the critically savaged flop currently playing at the Cineplex.
Their cigarette smoking alone is so frequent and intense, the deep drags and long luxuriant exhales of old-time ecstasy, it’ll be a wonder if they don’t both get lung cancer as a result. In a typical example of overkill, Phillips strenuously relates smoking cigarettes, a hard-won prison privilege, with personal autonomy and the entertainment industry joys of yesteryear, so you can imagine how much smoking goes on as the Joker and Lee stop taking their meds and formulate their plans to escape and do crimes and sing duets and find renegade bliss together. If you’ve recently quit smoking, beware!
Phillips and Phoenix, close collaborators, are giving many interviews about their ambitious intentions for a high-risk film venture because, as Phoenix put it, they’re both addicted to “the thrill of failing [while] doing what you love.” Their stated desire was to create a deliberately fractured experience: “The goal of this movie is to make it feel like it was made by crazy people. . . . The inmates are running the asylum.”
As a result, you get scenes like the Joker representing himself while on trial in protracted courtroom scenes, adopting a chicken-fried Southern accent to do so. That was a good recurring gag in Futurama, which featured a clichéd yarn-spinning Southern lawyer that was an actual chicken working for chicken feed, but it’s annoying here because it’s not funny and it doesn’t go anywhere.
There’s a lot that doesn’t go anywhere, or at least doesn’t go where scenes seems to be pointing, in this film. For example, the great Brendan Gleeson plays a sadistic guard at Arkham Asylum who is nice to Arthur for a while in that menacing way that makes you tense up, waiting for even greater brutality to come. That development is accompanied by multiple scenes of increasing prisoner rebellion, indicating we’re going to be watching a horribly violent prison riot at some climactic point in the film that targets Gleeson’s guard.
There are about twenty songs performed, or perhaps it just seems that way over the course of two hours and eighteen minutes.
It never happens. There’s probably another song instead.
It’s a shame that the risk-taking aspects of Joker: Folie à Deux tend to have such a frustrating and muted effect, because bold departures in genre films can be wonderful, obviously. But from the very first scene, there’s a warning note struck in the way Phillips’s big swings don’t come off. Joker: Folie à Deux (gah, that stupid title) starts with an animated sequence that’s supposed to represent the Warner Bros. cartoon version of Arthur/Joker’s split-personality experience. It shows the Joker and his shadow vying for control of his showbiz success, and it’s terribly unfunny and literal-minded and dull. It doesn’t even do a good job evoking the Looney Tunes house style.
French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet, creator of The Triplets of Belleville, claims to have suggested to Phillips that they do a “Tex Avery–style cartoon,” making this sequence an even more shockingly incompetent failure. If you’ve ever seen an Avery cartoon from his prime years at Warner Bros., where he pioneered an eye-popping, exaggeratedly action-packed style that he transferred over to MGM — and if you haven’t, get on it — you know his work is the wildest, most riotous, irreverent, and hilarious of any top animator of the 1930s to the 1950s, and therefore the most readily imitated.
This limp cartoon offering casts a pall over the film’s opening that it never recovers from. It’s an apt warning of the botched bummer to come.