The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
I wish I could have been there when director and co-writer Todd Phillips pitched the idea for Joker: Folie à Deux because logically this movie shouldn’t exist. The first Joker was a massive, $1 billion grossing hit ostensibly based on the most famous villain in all of pop culture. This sequel seems almost irritated by the success of the original, taking everything that audiences might expect from a sequel, throwing it in the trash and setting it on fire. Folie à Deux is a movie that seems to go out of its way to troll its audience and it’s therefore understandable why most people absolutely hate it. But I actually kind of liked it, or at least I respect it’s brazen contempt for itself.
I enjoyed the original Joker, but my biggest issue with it is when it tries to be about, well, the Joker. The Arthur Fleck character just isn’t Joker as I know the character; he’s just a mentally ill man in clown makeup. The film bogged down whenever it tried to tie itself into the comics when it clearly didn’t want to be a part of that world. I then assumed (and I think most people assumed) that the sequel would address this by showing Joker rise through the ranks of the Gotham underworld and become something more akin to the Joker that we know from other media.
That’s not what we get from this movie. Not by a longshot. Instead of giving audiences what they want (or at least what they expected), Folie à Deux doubles down on everything off-putting about the original and refuses to provide anything remotely crowd-pleasing. Instead of moving more into the comic book realm, the film is mainly a courtroom drama as the events of the first movie are litigated. That’s really it. In terms of plot, it is little more than an epilogue to the original about the aftermath and implications of that film’s events.
That isn’t a crowd-pleasing approach and it certainly doesn’t sound like a $200 million comic book movie. But, purely in terms of storytelling, it does make sense as a sequel to Joker. It doesn’t make narrative sense for Arthur Fleck to transform into the Clown Prince of Crime. He isn’t a criminal mastermind, he’s just a sad, pathetic little man with serious mental health issues that slipped through the cracks of the system. A logical continuation of that story would not see Arthur fighting Batman on the rooftops of Gotham. The first film was, for better or worse, firmly grounded in reality and do you know what would happen to someone like that in reality? They would spend the rest of their life in a mental institution, not in a grandiose battle between good an evil. Folie à Deux mocks the idea of making a sequel to Joker by giving us a sequel that makes sense, entertainment value be damned.
In doing so, Folie à Deux almost seems to hate its audience and questions why we would find entertainment value in a movie like Joker. The film is largely a condemnation of the celebrity status of criminals (particularly mentally-ill killers) and true-crime culture. The courtroom scenes are filled with supporters of the Joker, people that have hijacked and adopted Arthur’s mental illness into their own personal causes and cultural crusades. It’s an obvious commentary on how some viewers, in a complete misinterpretation of the first movie, saw Arthur Fleck as a sympathetic or even heroic figure for whatever social narrative they are trying to push (it is a similar phenomenon to how idiots idolize Tony Montana, apparently never having gotten around to watching the last 10 minutes of Scarface). Folie à Deux is seemingly disgusted by its own existence as a piece of entertainment and I don’t recall ever seeing a movie so judgmental of its own audience.
Oh, and this is a musical. Kind of. Much like the central narrative, it’s a musical in a way that makes sense in context but was seemingly designed to please no one. Many critics have noted that the musical numbers don’t move the plot forward, as is traditionally done in musicals. Well, yeah, but for two reasons: 1. There is very little plot to move forward and 2. They are just delusions taking place in the characters’ heads. The music isn’t diegetic in the context of the plot, so they couldn’t move the plot forward even if there was one to move forward. The term “folie à deux” is French and translates to “madness of two,” which is pretentious as fuck and refers to the delusion shared by Joker and Lee (Lady Gaga). The point of the musical numbers is not to be catchy or move the plot forward, but to illustrate their shared delusion that they are larger than life figures being unfairly persecuted. As with most things in this movie, one can easily argue that it doesn’t work from an entertainment perspective, but I don’t think that they are out of place from a thematic perspective.
Speaking of Lady Gaga, I think that she is quite good in this for what she is asked to do. Many have said that she is miscast, which baffles me. Try to think of a woman that fits the following requirements: 1. A big name; 2. A great singer; 3. A good actress and 4. A hot blonde. Let me know what names you come up with, because I’m struggling to think of anyone else. She often downgrades her own voice since she isn’t supposed to be playing a professional singer and it’s kind of amusing to see her pretend not to have an amazing voice aside from a few of the musical numbers where she is able to let loose because the rules of reality no longer apply. In another creative move that will please nobody, she also isn’t really playing Harley Quinn. She is never called that (she is only referred to as Lee) and has little in common with the character as I know her, but the same can be said for Joker. Hell, the same could be said of The Riddler in The Batman. That is the pitfall of trying so hard to ground these comic book characters in reality: they lose any sense of fun when they must adhere to the “real world” and not the comic book page. As such, this is not the version of Harley that I want to see, but Gaga does well with whatever this is.
Most people made up their minds about this movie well before it was released. Last week I was having a debate with a guy that vehemently hated the movie and I realized, about halfway through the conversation, that he hadn’t actually seen it. I don’t understand that mentality. Folie à Deux is a big-budget studio mess, but it’s a refreshingly different kind of mess. Most big studio movies are made by teams of executives, fervently going over checklists to make sure the movie can appeal to as many people as possible while leaving an impression on no one. This movie just doesn’t give a fuck. It pretends to be a comic book movie, but the comic characters are just a Trojan horse for an arthouse movie about the deification of killers and the misappropriation of social issues as weapons in culture wars. It is like the film equivalent of a Sex Pistols concert: it’s a creative trainwreck that doesn’t care about the quality of experience for the audience, but I can’t call it insincere. I’m not saying that people will (or should) like this movie; in fact, I’m pretty sure they won’t. But it also shouldn’t be outright dismissed, either.
