Academy Award-nominated director Todd Phillips and his new sequel Joker: Folie à Deux bravely ask the daring question: What if the most annoying man you know got an equally annoying girlfriend? And what if they sang show tunes to each other? And what if you had to watch?
The man in question is one Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the social outcast turned serial killer from 2019’s Joker, who is in jail awaiting trial following the events of the first film. The girlfriend is one Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a woman with both a master’s in psychiatry and an obsession with Fleck, who gets herself locked up in order to stalk him better. Harley Quinn and Joker’s toxically codependent relationship has existed in the Batverse for decades — first appearing in Batman: The Animated Series in 1992 — and the former doctor and the one-time patient who drove her mad have been explored across comics, movies, and TV. In Phillips’s new film, however, their entanglement is rewritten to be even more grim and, frankly, flat (especially Quinn’s arc), but with a lot more singing.
Yes, though he is loath to tell anyone, Phillips has also managed to make a movie musical about the Joker’s murder trial. On paper, creating a supervillain movie that doesn’t involve setting a city on fire or threatening the world is about as subversive as a director can get. Potentially ignoring the strict directives that come with franchise filmmaking and the demands of Warner Brothers and then throwing in singing and dancing? There was potential here for something truly subversive.
But as Fleck reminds us, some people don’t seek change, but simple misery. For two hours and 20 minutes of Joker: Folie à Deux, Phillips shows us how.
Do not be fooled, Joker 2 is actually a musical
Following a trend of movies like Mean Girls and Wonka, the marketing and creative team behind Joker: Folie à Deux, a.k.a. Joker 2, have refrained from making it clear the movie is a musical (a choice the upcoming Wicked also seems to be making). Some of that obfuscation might be a conscious effort not to alienate Joker’s original audience, but it may also be based on the notion that movie-going audiences don’t like musicals. Mean Girls and Wonka didn’t sell themselves as musicals, and they were considered box office successes — meanwhile obvious musicals like the West Side Story revival and In the Heights underwhelmed.
That said, and despite the reluctance, Joker 2 is very much a movie musical — at times trying to be a very edgy one.
Phillips uses music as a very obvious storytelling device, if not a very sensitive one. Throughout the film, Fleck’s sanity is in question. Everyone from judges to doctors talk about him living in a “fantasy world.” Enter: the singing and dancing. From “Get Happy” to the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” the movie’s numbers function as a glimpse into Fleck’s desires, fears, and mental illness all rolled into one.
One can only know the surreal interior life of this man by peering into his delirious hallucinations, where we find a sparkly, razzle-dazzle version of his trauma and mental illness.
These moments also allow Lady Gaga to take off her pop star mask and show us Stefani Germanotta, theater kid. She’s good — especially when Fleck envisions himself and Harley as a kind of chaotic Sonny and Cher duo. Gaga’s committed, crackling performance is proof there is room for another Judy Garland biopic, as long as she can audition.
Phoenix, on the other hand, warbles and screeches through his numbers.
The result sounds like a big bird harassing another smaller bird. Phoenix’s vocal performance is knowingly bad, especially when you consider this man won an Oscar for playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. Perhaps Phillips believes that his audience wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend how disturbed Fleck is if he sounds smooth and delightful in his own fantasies, but Phoenix deliberately makes him sound discordant. After three or so songs, the singing just feels a little like some kind of petty punishment. I suppose that’s the point: Being in Joker’s head is supposed to be an unpleasant experience. I just wanted to be unpleased in a different way.
Imagine if you took all the fun out of My Cousin Vinny, then you have Joker 2
The most perplexing element of Joker 2 is not that it’s a musical; it’s that it’s a courtroom procedural. While there’s a rich cinematic history of clowns and their girlfriends in courtrooms, this is not a choice that makes for an exciting film.
At the heart of this two-hour and 20-minute movie is the question of whether or not Arthur Fleck, a.k.a Joker, is insane and, by extension, if the Joker is real. His attorney (played by Catherine Keener) claims as a defense strategy that while Fleck did kill five people, he has dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder. (The police don’t know Fleck killed his own mother, which would bring the body count to six.) Joker is that other personality, and so Fleck can’t be held responsible. Prosecutor Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) — the man who will become the Batman villain known as Two-Face — argues that Fleck and Joker are one and the same: a violently depraved murderer.
Watching Fleck in jail waiting for trial or on trial waiting to go back to jail just doesn’t make for thrilling viewing. Dissociative identity disorder as a legal argument is sort of compelling but less so when it becomes all that’s happening. (It’s also important to note that despite some media portrayals, people with DID are not more violent than the general public.) Courtroom procedurals need some kind of twist or some kind of build to enhance the drama. Starting with all the cards on the table — Arthur Fleck is culpable for Joker or he isn’t — just takes the air out of the genre.
Maybe that’s why it’s a musical?
As a character who has been an icon since the 1960s, the Joker was created to terrorize Gotham City. The Joker was not created to sit in a jail cell and talk legal strategy with his lawyer. There’s a reason that so many Batman comics and adaptations have a jailbreak scene. Batman’s villains are more interesting when they’re doing crime!
Phillips seems to want to make a bigger point about how the most terrifying part of the character is Joker’s influence over Gotham’s citizens. If Fleck is allowed to be Joker, then what’s stopping everyone else in the city from being Joker? If Fleck is declared legally insane, how can the laws in Gotham keep people safe? If no one can be held accountable for murder, it doesn’t matter how powerful Gotham’s police force is; it doesn’t even matter how powerful its heroes are. But other than the huge crowds outside of the courtroom, some in Joker masks, Phillips doesn’t really show us what’s happening in Gotham. We aren’t really made to understand the stakes for Joker’s verdict, even if they’re the destruction of a civilized society.
Worst of all, Phillips has intentionally or unintentionally created a bizarro, humorless version of My Cousin Vinny. In the 1992 classic, a clown and his Italian girlfriend are the only people that stand in the way of a mixed-up town convicting a pair of dweebs of murder. In Joker 2, a clown and his Italian-ish girlfriend are the only people that stand in the way of a mixed-up town convicting a dweeb of murder. Now, imagine if Marisa Tomei wasn’t charming, the clown wasn’t funny, and there were no twists, no turns, and no 1963 Pontiac Tempest with its independent rear suspension. Your honor, that dour, miserable thing is The Joker 2.