Joker: Folie À Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux comes elbowing its way onto our screens, defying the poetic finality of its predecessor to confront a perplexed and sighing audience. It’s hard to ignore the public noise about a film as big as this - people are ripping it to shreds, and while my negativity is not so vociferous, I feel I have to add to this chorus.
When the first film ended with Joker standing atop a car and lit by fire as mobs cheered for him, I felt it was a nice “and he lived menacingly ever after…” finish for him. It gestured towards the Joker canon like a good origin story does and then came to a close - a perfectly nice ending. With Folie à Deux, Joker is snatched from the sunset into which he’s walking and miserably squashed. It’s a fine thing to do, nothing wrong with it on the surface, but with no focus and no direction, the premise is all there is to latch onto and it just unfolds nakedly, going nowhere.
Folie à Deux attempts to extend the story from the first film, taking Arthur (Joker) into Arkham Asylum where he awaits trial for the murders that took place in the first film. The fever pitch that the original ended on carries into its sequel. The mobs are still baying for blood, and Joker is a more messianic figure than ever, playing into the themes of tabloid culture, and the sensationalism of personas.
These are the few new themes explored in Deux, and the ones it puts all of its weight into. Frequent breaks into musical fantasy, lies and manipulations upholding a fraudulent persona, and an unreliable narrator are the mechanisms they use to deconstruct Joker, like panning the camera from a huge frightening shadow to the frail, shivering little thing casting it.
From the first moment, Joaquin Phoenix’s utterly unique physique is played to pacify and demean Arthur. Shocking amounts of shoulder blade, spine, and miscellaneous inner material rub and undulate under his skin as he stiffly shuffles about the corridors of the Asylum. But then in moments of passion, most often the passion he finds in his fantasies, Joaquin Phoenix spreads out, opens up, somehow taking up 10 times the space he did before as he dances (and sometimes sings) about the set.
Bless Phoenix, he does everything in his power to justify the musical framework and animate his ultimately flat role as energetically as possible. It’s just a shame that Deux doesn’t do or say anything with any commensurate confidence or panache, which is incredibly important and doubly so for a musical.
When it entered the courtroom, I got a little intrigued, thinking it was going to become a full-fledged courtroom drama with extra doses of tension as legions of Joker’s apostles outside, masked and armed, beat at the walls of the building. But of course, there’s no tension if you know the result, and we do know what’s going to happen. By the end of the courtroom part, we were left with a few musical numbers ringing in our ears, a sense that he’s pitifully mentally ill, and nothing else.
At another point, he’s interviewed by media and at another point a psychiatrist, calling back to the iconic interview from the first film. As they play out, we learn repeatedly that he’s unwell and he’s imagining things. The film runs out of fresh perspectives on these themes very early but continues to reexplore them in new scenes throughout.
In another act of defying the Joker canon, Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) as Harley Quinn makes frequent appearances. Because Arthur is so maligned, diminished, and disarmed by the film—realistically, I may add—Harley had to take the dominant role almost by necessity. Joaquin’s Joker has had his heart ripped out too many times, and is too lonely, sad, and in need of real connection for him to plausibly cast a spell of seduction or manipulation over her. This famously abusive relationship is turned around, with Joker pining for her, as she manipulates and lies her way into his affection.
A scene from Joker: Folie à Deux, courtesy of Warner Bros, shared via IMDb
Whether you appreciate this inversion or not, I think you’ll find Stefani was fantastic as Harley. With pretty amazing exactitude, she hit the balance between Lady Macbeth and an obsessive fan intoxicated by his persona and presence. This Harley is drawn to Joker like a moth to flame. His anarchic persona is something she wants to mix herself up in. She goes out of her way to find him, and when she does, her passion and intensity sets a flame in Arthur. She leads him along, lying to him, fueling his fantasy, and cajoling him into bringing out his chaotic alter ego. She wants that excitement of anarchy and murder, that fantasy, that control, but at the same time, she knows it’s imaginary. Her performance is an octave under Arthur’s in terms of animatedness. She appears more thoughtful, calm, and aware of everyone around her, which lends her an immediate aura of knowing something we don’t.
Her performances in the musical numbers are expectedly great as well, though it must be said that the existence and frequency of these numbers become tedious pretty quickly. They’re ostensibly used to draw a line between reality and fantasy, but once the music begins to start and the line is drawn, nothing new is communicated by the actual performing of the entire song. So it feels a bit like a novelty used to justify and distinguish a sequel. Without it, it may have been even more painfully obvious that this film is 20 minutes of ideas drawn out over 2 hours.
