Joker – 2019
On the one hand, Joker was a well-made and interesting movie, but on the other hand, I was actually pretty disappointed. I feel like the movie’s entire premise was almost a deception. It was supposed to be a movie about the possible origins of Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, but really it wasn’t. It was as if the character of the Joker was used as an excuse to tell the story of a mentally unstable psychopathic serial killer. The movie was ninety percent that, and ten percent Supervillain. The sprinkling of Batman elements mostly came near the end of the film, and felt like afterthoughts. I’ll explain.
Traditionally, the Joker is a secondary character in the Batman mythos, and I see nothing wrong with making an entire movie telling his story. But Batman is a fantasy. I mean, I understand that adding reality to the story makes the fantasy more grounded and real, but this movie took out the fantasy element so completely that I had trouble associating it with the long-known and established character of the Joker. Thus, it could so easily have been a movie about any mentally unstable murderer. The fact that this one happened to be Batman’s arch-nemesis was either incidental or coincidental.
Interesting Note: I’m not the only one who felt this way. According to Wikipedia, “Phoenix believes that Fleck is the actual Joker; however, director Todd Phillips said that he intentionally left it ambiguous as to whether Arthur becomes the actual Joker as seen in traditional Batman stories or inspires a separate character.” However, the few Batman elements that were put in were undeniable. We even saw the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents… again.
One thing I noticed about the character was the way it was written. They actually tried to make him a sympathetic character. They presented his mental illness in such a way as to say that he was a victim of it. It wasn’t his fault that he was a violent murderer. He had the desire to be a good person, and was on multiple medications to correct his mental imbalance, but because of state-wide budget cuts, his access to his medications was ended. He never wanted to have a gun, but after he is beat up by street thugs, his friend gives him one so he can protect himself. And he only uses it when he is getting beat up a second time. And he only murders his mother after he learned that she had lied to him all his life about being adopted, and that she had allowed an ex-lover to physically abuse him when he was a child. All these things, and others, point to the idea that he was only bad because the world made him that way, not because he was just a bad egg.
But that being said, the movie had some fantastic acting, especially from its lead, Joaquin Phoenix. The character of Arthur Fleck, the man who becomes the Joker by the end of the movie, is shown from the very beginning to be a profoundly mentally disturbed man. He has a mental disorder that causes him to laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate times. But his psychological problems go far deeper than that. Throughout the movie, we learn that he has never been happy a single day in his life, and Phoenix really made me believe that about the character.
Phoenix was simply incredible. He took home the Oscar for Best Actor for the role and I think he really deserved it. Through his performance, I could see both the internal and the external struggles of a man with severe mental illness. You could see how he hated who he was and how he behaved, and you could see how he was powerless to change any of it. He had frequent hallucinations, making up events and stories in his mind that had nothing to do with the real world.
Other wonderful performances in the film were Robert DeNiro as Murray Franklin, a Johnny Carson-like talk-show host, Frances Conroy as Arthur’s mother Penny, Zazie Beetz as Sophie, the neighbor who he delusionally fantasizes about being his girlfriend, and Brett Cullen as Thomas Wayne, little Bruce’s father who is running to be Mayor of Gotham. Each of them turned in pretty good performances, though they were all quite easily overshadowed by Phoenix. But that’s not surprising, seeing as how he was the focus of the entire film.
The movie actually got a lot of attention and praise from critics, but I find it interesting that it has only a sixty-eight percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a fifty-nine out of a hundred rating on Metacritic. What this tells me is that it is actually a fairly average move that was elevated to a higher status because of Joaquin Phoenix’s incredible performance of a mentally unbalance character who may or may not have been the iconic villain. And when it comes down to it, I have to agree with those numbers.
So I have to ask myself: did I like the movie? It was alright Would I watch it again? Probably not. Did it deserve its Best Picture nomination? No, but I think it most definitely deserve its Best Actor nomination and win. It was good as a movie about a man with mental illnesses, like the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, but not as a movie about the Joker.