Joker

In Todd Phillips’s Joker, Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck puts ‘paid’ to Beat sage William S. Burroughs’s quip that ‘a psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on’.

Fleck, a professional clown, is a marginalized, middle-aged man who has divided his life between his mother’s small outer-borough apartment and a state psychiatric hospital. His demonstrably limited theater-of-self projects delusions of being a professional comedian. But the violence of a series of incidents clues Fleck in to ‘what’s going on’ and opens his eyes to the fact that he is condemned to be a ‘schmuck for life’. The film chronicles the steps he takes to fight this realization as he memorializes it. 

We went to this picture under the misimpression that Martin Scorsese directed it; we expected Phoenix to deliver another of his obsessive, self-absorbed, off-beat characters. The story runs on the rails of the superhero genre, but it is as much of a piece and turned out to be as absorbing to watch as a Scorsese picture. And Phoenix’s raw physicality, intensity, and movement, his body like that of a scourged figure in a medieval painting, often gave us the sense we were watching Daniel Day-Lewis. Phoenix’s Joker is his best work, a role absorbed in every pore and as mesmerizing to watch as a ritual dance.

And in a sense it is just that.

Arthur Fleck is based on the Joker, Batman’s criminal archenemy in the DC Comics series created in 1939 by illustrator Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. The Big City is Batman’s Gotham. We see an Arkham State Hospital, the fictional DC Comics psychiatric hospital which held several of Batman’s foes. And Phillips and his cowriter Scott Silver’s narrative incorporates the origin of the Bruce Wayne-Batman legend. But rather than follow the growth of a wronged ego into a right-minded, crime-fighting superego, in this tale the wronged ego finds its super id.

The dance of this antihero’s id occupies the space at the still center of a deeply disturbed Fleck amid the seemingly chaotic world that surrounds him—a world that younger viewers may not recognize because it is resembles New York City in the early 1980s, that faraway place where Scorsese notably shot Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982) both starring Robert De Niro. De Niro plays a delusional avenger in the former; in the latter he is the failed comic Rupert Pupkin who attempts to grab the limelight with his motto ‘Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.’ The character Fleck derives much from these two avatars.

De Niro also appears here. The King of Comedy’s Pupkin evidently served his debt to society, changed his name to Murray Franklin, and reformed into exactly the same smug, narcissistic celebrity ‘king’ whom Pupkin originally envied and detested.

Much has been made over whether there is a Message here which relates to the Shallow State of Planet Trump: celebrity kings and CEOs, anarchy, an Angry White Man lone gunman, and a mass movement to resist purported overlords. The writers have woven into their story elements of our day as they have those of DC Comics and past Scorsese pictures. There is no Internet. What we see is a highly organized society with no guiding light; there are self-interested, hypocritical but clueless local ‘kings’ like Franklin and Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a ‘White Investments’ and its privileged and abusive ‘White employees’, but in which leadership, no longer relevant, has devolved to persons-in-the-street to do for themselves.

Be that as it may. Superhero genre mavens will comb critically for references to their Great Stories and Scorsese fans and film buffs likely will find a bonanza of references to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. 

Phillips seasons his stew with flavors from the nightly news, Batman, and Scorsese, but he is truest to Scorsese. His shots, montage, and editing are focused, crisp, and clean. The images tell the story, from the classical Greek comedy and tragedy ‘masks’ which introduce the action to the bloody footprints that bring it home. And Phoenix gives us a master performance. This is a beautiful picture to watch.

Joker 2019 U.S. (122 minutes) Warner Brothers. Directed by Todd Phillips, written by Phillips and Scott Silver; cinematography by Lawrence Sher; music by Hildur Guðnadóttir; editing by Jeff Groth; production design by Mark Friedberg; art direction by Laura Bellinger.