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.  

 

A Western in cars

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is no less a Western about a fairy-tale West than John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), but here cars are the horses and cowboys past their prime are aging Hollywood cowboy movie dudes in the studio sunset.

Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio) miss the good old days.

Tarantino’s story imagines an alternative version of the fateful August night fifty years ago in which four followers of Charles Manson shocked the world after they wreaked their helter-skelter mayhem on four unsuspecting Beautiful People and a happenstance teenager in Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s Hollywood hills home. Other than note that the main characters repeatedly cross paths, this is all MP will say about the plot.

Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) does Playboy Mansion with the Beautiful People.

The four Beautiful People are all characters: actress and model Tate (Margot Robbie), girlfriend of film director Polanski (Rafal Zwierucha in an Austin Powers get-up); Tate’s friend and confidante Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), hairstylist to the Hollywood in-crowd; coffee heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson), and Polanski’s friend Voytek Frykowski (Costa Ronin). But these worthies take a back seat to their neighbors, the fictional fading cowboy star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double and sidekick Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), ‘more than a brother and a little less than a wife.’

Tarantino’s black-and-white opening feels straight from the Coens' playbook.

The film’s opening feels straight from the Coen brothers’ playbook: a black-and-white Western meet-up with Rick and Cliff via a campy 1960s-television-style Hollywood celebrity interview; it closes on a similar note, with Rick doing a black-and-white television ad for ‘Red Apple Cigarettes’. Another Coenesque touch is a spunky eight-year-old girl, Trudi (Julie Butters), an actor on a television Western pilot set with DiCaprio’s Rick. Anyone as focused and dedicated as Trudi would make someone even twice her age feel washed-up.

A focused Trudi (Julie Butters) gives cowboy Rick a good going over.

Tarantino has done something similar to what Huston did with his own misfits, in that he put together a movie buff’s dream team. Like Huston’s Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, DiCaprio and Pitt each is at the top of his game; though Robbie appears to have a lot more fun playing a self-conscious, method-mad actress than Marilyn Monroe had being one.

Margot Robbie shares the fun playing a self-conscious Sharon Tate.

The Mansonites and reasonable facsimiles also are here: Charlie himself (Damon Herriman) and Tex Watson (Austin Butler), with a Katie (Madisen Beaty) and a Sadie (Mikey Madison) presumably as stand-ins for Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkle. Lena Dunham is Gypsy and Dakota Fanning looks like one of the Evil Dead as Squeaky Fromme. Bruce Dern is George Spahn of Spahn Ranch where the Mansonites lived with a full contingent of hippie chicks with single handles like Pussycat (Margaret Qualley). We hear the John Phillips song ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Come to the Valley)’: do they ever!

Lena Dunham’s Gypsy and Margaret Qualley’s Pussycat meow at Cliff (Brad Pitt).

Hip Hollywood is no less in the mix. Damien Lewis and Mike Moh cameo as look-alikes of Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee, and Al Pacino is Rick’s over-the-top agent Marvin Schwarzs—‘without a “t”!’ a character Terry Southern could have made up. A cavalcade of actors play movie and music people of the 1960s.

Damien Lewis catches Steve McQueen’s magic in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

Along with the sunny, chart-topping music of the time, a sweet touch is having Folger (Samantha Robinson), one of Tate’s houseguests, accompany herself on a piano in Tate’s house on the John Phillips song ‘Straight Shooter’.

Al Pacino’s Marvin Schwarzs is the only Tarantinoesque motor mouth.

But apart from Pacino’s Schwarzs, with all the laconic cowboys, Hollywood people obsessed with their looks and laid-back Angelenos, youthful cultists and druggies, Tarantino does not have one of his trademark motor-mouth characters. The verbal humor in this film, consistent throughout, is keyed to a lower register. Rick, instructed in the use of a military flamethrower for a movie by a technical expert, asks: ‘Anything we can do about that heat?’ to which the instructor replies, after a beat: ‘It’s a flamethrower.’

Tarantino peppers his script with film and television references to both actual and his own fictional actors, television shows, films, and music, but this is the common language of media that unite this world. He executes a tidy entrechat in leaping out of this frame of reference by having Tate buy Polanski a signed first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Polanski’s film Tess came a decade later), and then back into it by making the senior actor who plays the bookseller the former 1960s television Western star Clu Gulager.

Cliff (Brad Pitt) chauffeurs a cowboy friend who lost his license (Leo DiCaprio).

So where does this leave Rick and Cliff? Tarantino’s nostalgia would be for fairy-tale old Los Angeles where every tomorrow is the same beautiful today and movie cowboys ride classic cars to happy tunes on wide-open freeways into the golden light. But Rick’s old frontier is filled with the new; for a washed-up cowboy actor, the new frontier is spaghetti Westerns.

In a sense, DiCaprio channels Philip Seymour Hoffman. And Tarantino lets Pitt, with his true best friend pit bull Brandy, open up a stand-up guy character, incidentally a ‘war hero’ who infamously ‘got away with killing his wife’, like a muscle car on the 1969 freeway. 

Cliff (Brad Pitt) and his true best friend in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

This great-big picture is a long feast for the eyes. All the actors appear to be having fun. Filled with incident, detail, pop references, terrific writing and acting, humor, action, and classic tunes, it is so beautifully shot that it begs to be seen on a big screen.

Though back to Cliff—whose player’s most notable screen drug use was as Floyd the pothead roommate in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance—the question may come down to how the Manson family look on acid.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood 2019 U.S. (161 minutes) Sony Pictures Entertainment. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; Robert Richardson, director of photography; editing by Fred Raskin; casting by Victoria Thomas; production design by Barbara Ling.