I saw this today. It felt like a big fat nothing. I'm now going to paste in a two-thousand-word review I wrote for my blog, but haven't published yet because - as mentioned at the end of the review - I'm temporarily in Hong Kong and only have a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. I can generate text, but actually assembling a blog post is too much effort, not least because it's 32C and my feet hurt.
I'm sure you're familiar with the Big Mac Index. In Hong Kong the Big Mac is undervalued, and yet it's so hot that I'm not hungry. That's irony. Also there's a thing called the GCB, which is a grilled unbreaded chicken burger. The chicken looks like a couple of big chunks of mushroom, it's horrible.
"Off to the cinema to see Joker, a film that sets up a fight between The Joker and a little person but then pulls its punches and has The Joker let the little person go.
It's like those superhero comics where Superman fights Muhammed Ali, or Superman fights Jackie Chan, or Batman fights Jackie Chan, or Superman fights Mike Tyson, and for it to work Superman has to be stripped of his powers by aliens, and because he doesn't really dislike Jackie Chan they agree to stage the fight and then they punch out the aliens who are holding them captive and escape.
But Joker doesn't even do that. The Joker doesn't team up with the little person. He has a name, by the way, but I didn't catch it. The Joker doesn't team up with the little person, he just lets him go. Joker tells the story of how top comic book villain The Joker became The Joker. In real life The Joker is a highly-strung, mentally-ill man called Arthur Fleck, who works as a clown, but he's a terrible clown so he gets fired. The little person works at the same agency as Fleck. Fleck's name sounds like "speck", which is basically what he is. In fact his name literally is Fleck, isn't it? A fleck is a thing. That's a word. You can have a fleck of paint. I don't need to use rhymes. Arthur Fleck is a fleck of a man.
He's a nobody, a bum, although he dreams of a career as a stand-up comedian and has visions of being on television and being a somebody and being respected by Robert De Niro (who plays a talk show host) and being hugged by Robert De Niro. Isn't that what we all want? For Robert De Niro to hug us, and respect us?
Imagine if Robert De Niro pretended to respect us but secretly despised us. Imagine if Robert De Niro mocked us on live television. You'd get mad, wouldn't you? You'd get angry. You'd want to shut Robert De Niro up. And I mean although Fleck doesn't become The Joker until the end of the film, he's a wiry guy, so you'd expect him to beat the little person easily, but the little person looks pretty fit, and he's had a hard life, because the film is set in the very early 1980s, when it was still just about acceptable to call little people midgets or dwarves.
He's had a hard life, but so has Arthur Fleck, because instead of being a normal person like most people he is instead adopted. Furthermore he was raised by a single mother. It's no wonder he turned out bad. The odds were stacked against him from the start. The thing about Joker is that it's thin. It's inconsequential. It's essentially a watered-down mixture of Taxi Driver and Network, but because those films were made in the 1970s they could be offensive. They still have elements that are shocking today. Remember when Travis Bickle starts ranting about junkies, punks, buggers, queens, and how sometimes he has to wash come off the back seat? Remember when Martin Scorsese (for it is he) says that he's going to ram a .44 Magnum up a woman's front bottom and blow it to shreds? Remember how no-one reprimanded Scorsese's character? Remember how the film just watched Bickle and Scorsese and all the other characters without feeling the need to tell us that they've been living in hell too long? You remember the joke earlier in this paragraph about how the Joker isn't a normal person because he's adopted? That's offensive. You can't say things like that nowadays. Even if you're the bad guy.
Even if you're the bad guy. See, Joker is essentially two different films at once. There's a melodrama about how Fleck discovers his past, but that felt like a first draft of another film. Parts of Joker take place inside Fleck's head. They're waking dreams that he has. He imagines that he's dating a lady who lives down the hall, but it's obviously a fantasy. Towards the end the film goes out of its way to make this clear, but it's unnecessary. Fleck obviously didn't get any pussy. He's deeply unappealing, but because this is 2019 he's not allowed to be truly offensive, or to say anything that makes him come across as bad, or that makes the audience uncomfortable. The people he kills are either unsympathetic or non-entities. Fleck doesn't fight the little person, because that would be unfair and would make him look bad. I mean, yes, technically Fleck stabs a man in the neck for no reason at all, but it comes out of nowhere and may or may not have been a dream sequence. It doesn't resonate emotionally, which is a general criticism I have of the film.
Two different films at once. Three different films. There's the melodrama, but that's rubbish. There's a variation of the poor-vs-rich theme running through Dark Knight Rises, but if anything Joker gives the idea less thought than the earlier film. In Dark Knight Rises it's obvious that the villainous Bane doesn't give a shit about the poor, he's just a fascist using them for his own personal aggrandisement, but Joker doesn't even have that depth. The film has come in for a certain amount of criticism for suggesting that the upper classes should not have a monopoly on the use of force, but all of that happens in the background. One of Fleck's crimes triggers off a wave of anti-yuppie sentiment, but it didn't resonate emotionally because it happens offscreen and Fleck himself lives in a bubble. At a pivotal point in the film he becomes caught up in a riot, but he doesn't even seem to be aware that he has inspired a movement. Instead he dances around as if in a trance, as if on stage in front of an appreciative audience. Curiously the film doesn't even run with the idea that he has become an accidental folk anti-hero, because in the very next scene he is behind bars.
Three films. It is in theory also a standard comic book film. It's an origin story of The Joker, who is the most famous adversary of Batman. In the Batman stories - whether in films or cartoons or comics or whatever - The Joker masterminds a series a brilliant crimes, but Batman catches him and puts him in Arkham Asylum, but he escapes and the cycle continues. Depending on the writer and the decade and the publication The Joker is either a wisecracking bank robber who uses motorised teeth as a distraction, or alternatively he's a depraved child murderer who cuts smiles into the faces of his victims - cuts their flesh with an actual knife - or he exists between those two poles. The key thing is that he's competent. As with The Batman he's not superhuman. He's just a man, not even a particularly strong man, but he's ruthless and good with a knife and is smart enough to tax Batman. It wouldn't be fun otherwise.
Arthur Fleck on the other hand isn't competent. He's not even on the lucky-idiot level of someone like Ted Bundy. He makes no attempt to cover up his early killings, and the only murder he pre-plans is ludicrous. The film generally takes place in the same gritty world as The Wire or Goodfellas or one of those gangster films, but towards the end the air of verisimilitude breaks down. I don't want to give it away, but the ease with which Fleck delivers the punchline of his final joke stretches credibility. As a villain Fleck comes across as completely inept. The only time he does something even remotely clever it's a complete coincidence that relies on the presence of a tube train full of people wearing clown masks.
Ultimately the problem with Joker is that the film didn't engage me. Arthur Fleck is a pathetic figure who doesn't have a coherent philosophy. As a criminal mastermind he would be useless, and yet the film implies that this is just the beginning of his story. The mass movement he inspires takes place offscreen. The melodrama involving his parentage is a shoehorn. A late revelation that Fleck is partially responsible for a key element of the Batman mythos made me think "so what".
On a purely visceral, Death Wish level the kills are pretty good. Fleck stabs a guy in the neck and then smashes his head against a wall leaving blood everywhere. It's fantastic, but it doesn't feel meaningful. There are three laughs, two of which are guilty laughs. Ultimately the film feels like a great big nothing, a lot of pretend angst masking a boring story. It's a revival of the kind of Welcome-to-Fear-City films that came out in the 1970s, but this New York doesn't even appear particularly sordid. Despite being a film for grown-ups it's surprisingly prudish in the modern style. There's almost no swearing; no nudity; no perversion; the people who are mean to the little person are shown to be assholes; even the yuppies that Fleck kills don't do anything particularly bad. There are no prostitutes and Fleck doesn't go to a strip club. He doesn't sadistically torture anyone or strip the flesh off their face or anything.
Couldn't they at least have made him a clown butcher? Butcher by day, clown by night? I would pay to see that film. BUTCHER CLOWN, the script writes itself. Shoot it on the shittest 35mm off-cuts available, mono soundtrack, dub it to videotape, then dub that tape to a second tape, then get voiceover people to loop the dialogue, have it released to VHS on a label you've never heard of, bingo.
Would Joker have been better if it had been made in the 1970s, when you could use the N-word and say the F-for-homosexual word and have a white man threaten to blow a black man's head clean off and he was the good guy? It would essentially be Dirty Harry, but told from the point of view of the Scorpio killer, and there would be no Dirty Harry. Imagine if the film had Jack Nicholson, but the Jack Nicholson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Last Detail. It's a fascinating idea forever lost to history.
Anything else? The film also has an overt reference to Bob Monkhouse. I realise the joke is old as the hills, but some comedians become so associated with certain jokes that they own the joke, and Bob Monkhouse owns that joke. Wherever you are, Bob, I thought of you today.
Oh yes, the performances. Joe-a-quim Phoenix is Arthur Fleck. He has a bunch of mannerisms and isn't afraid to be embarrassing, but as mentioned earlier I felt nothing for the character so his performance was wasted. He's like Forrest Gump without the charisma, a self-pitying nobody. A mostly passive moron whose revenge against the people who wronged him feels arbitrary and unsatisfying. I wanted to cheer him on as he stabbed and tortured fat businessmen and policemen and pimps and yuppies and so on, but the film doesn't want anything to do with that sort of thing.
None of the other actors stood out. Robert De Niro has an extended cameo as a talk show host, but throughout the film he puts on a performance as a talk show host, so it's hard to evaluate his actual performance. Does that make sense? We never see the character that De Niro plays when he's off screen (a brief meeting he shares with Fleck is presumably still in character) so he's just a talk show host. A different film might have portrayed him as a stuck record that can't cope with a sudden burst of shocking reality, but the film is, to its credit, smarter than that. At a pivotal moment De Niro's character obviously senses that he has a scoop on live television, but instead of panicking he tries to dig out the story. Which is smart - I suspect that Johnny Carson would have done the same thing, in the same situation - but frustrating.
Music? It's pretty good. Literal. Wonky cellos and strings as if to suggest that Arthur Fleck is unhinged. The cinematography is standard mid-2010s digital, with everything shot at f/1.4 and the colours are pastel and there's lens flare. It uses "the film look", which ironically doesn't look like film, so on a visual level it has very little in common with Taxi Driver or Serpico or Wolfen or The Warriors etc. It uses a modern trick whereby some scenes start off with camera rock steady, and then it cuts to the exact same shot but suddenly its hand-held and wobbly. There's probably a name for it. Selective stabilisation. Stabilisation ramping. I don't know. Ask David Mullen on Cinematographers.net, he probably knows.
For the record I saw the film at the AMC Pacific Place in Hong Kong! Because this week I'm in Hong Kong. It's a Cat IIB film, one step down from the no-holds-barred Cat III of Sex and Zen and Naked Killer infamy. There was one trailer, for Terminator: Dark Fate. The film had Chinese subtitles, which is fine if you imagine that Fleck is hallucinating in Chinese. As with a lot of places in Hong Kong the air conditioning was on an overkill setting, but this suited the film fine. It was a midday screening and the theatre was about half-full. I mention up the page that the New York of Joker doesn't seem particularly sordid; Kowloon beats it hollow."
That is my review of Joker. Imagine if this was 1998! The simple fact of writing a review of a film using a laptop and then publishing it on the internet while in Hong Kong would be enough to get me a column in Wired or Omni or something. And yet it's 2019 and people Hong Kong all the time.
― Ashley Pomeroy, Saturday, 12 October 2019 13:49 (four years ago) link