Joker: Folie à Deux – Midwest Film Journal

It has been amusing to watch Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga and director / co-writer Todd Phillips step-ball-change their way through their haphazardly choreographed chickenshitting about whether their new film, Joker: Folie à Deux, is a musical. (Spoiler alert: It is.) The concern, of course, is that musicals are often a tough box-office sell and doubly so to disaffected incels that pushed 2019’s Joker past $1 billion worldwide and whom Warner Brothers would like to return for round two. At the same time, Phillips’ high degree of difficulty for “comic-book musical” could perhaps court critical appreciation from those who found Joker overrated and underwhelming.

What this trio should have been cagey about is how much more monumentally boring and basic Folie à Deux is than the original — which was itself content to simply drop Joker into a clearly R-rated narrative for the first time. If music, as Folie à Deux suggests, makes us whole and balances our conflicting forces, the singing setpieces here make the film a whole lot of nothing and balance the conflicting forces of whose talent Phillips has more deeply wasted: Phoenix and his innate inspiration to investigate new aspects of a reprised role as Arthur Fleck (aka Joker) or Gaga (who portrays Joker’s love, Harleen “Harley Quinn” Quinzel), who proved she could do far more than simply sing her ass off in A Star is Born.

Although the film ostensibly follows Arthur’s trial for the murders he committed in the first film, Folie à Deux more frequently depicts the titular shared delusions from Arthur and his newfound paramour, “Lee” (as she prefers to be called), as musical numbers. This lineup includes standards by Harold Arlen, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David, among others, and they unspool on sets that span everything from precipitous rooftops and dark piano bars to brightly lit prime-time TV sets and dingy prison commons.

Staged by Phillips with little imagination and edited by Jeff Groth with even less oomph, these sequences typically feel like a Grate American Songbook — crutches on which the film leans to support quite limp character development and blasts of big, brassy surround sound bound to awaken slumbering audiences. The often purposefully dour arrangements feel like watching an entire film full of happy songs ironically, and laughably, inverted into minor keys for intense trailers. Only Gaga’s recalibration of “Close to You” into a stalker-ish torch song and Phoenix’s courtroom eruption of Bricusse & Newley’s “The Joker” stand out. Otherwise, the musical portions play like the fanciful interludes from Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King without any flair. Indeed, the “gonna build a mountain from a little hill” refrain from the oft-quoted “Gonna Build a Mountain” seems to be the mandate for a film of minimal incident and rather maximal length.

There is at least occasional tension to the counterpoint of Lee’s insulation from danger and Arthur’s isolation inside it, and Phoenix is at his most electrifying opposite a character who returns from the first film for an unexpected courtroom confrontation. (This scene also serves as an appreciated corrective to the manner in which this character was merely a punchline before.) However, Folie à Deux too often lets its characters dance around the parquet dance floor of a smoky club than any sort of lit fuse about to explode between them.

An animated prelude establishes the central question: Is the Joker merely a chaotic character that the long-abused Arthur has erected as mental armor and which he can blame for the murders in an insanity defense … or is Joker just a popular front for Arthur’s eagerness to connect with someone, anyone? During one of his many long, loud marches through Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial, Arthur catches a glimpse of Lee during a group singalong in a minimum-security wing. Officer Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) is among the guards with whom Arthur trades cigarettes for jokes, and the kindly yet firm Sullivan secures Arthur a spot in that group. Arthur’s behavior has been good, after all, and it’s also a way for Sullivan to screw around for several hours without actually having to work.

Lee has wound up at Arkham for setting fire to her parents’ apartment building. Or so she says. She grew up in the same neighborhood as Arthur. Or so she says. She survived abuse, too. Or … you get the picture. Arthur and Lee’s instantly amorous ardor spills over into the media-circus environment of his trial, which is largely leeched of life for anyone except audiences who have long waited to see Gotham golden boy Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) trying a case at length on a giant screen. Arthur may have found a reason to live. However, proving it will only give Gotham a reason to ensure he dies. And is Lee really in love with Arthur or just the violently brash Joker?

By trial’s end, Arthur makes multiple choices of considerable consequence. But it’s truly remarkable, in a film of such bloated length, that there is almost no arc for him to follow and arrive at those decisions. Most of them just simply happen out of nowhere. At least Arthur had a discernible path in the first film, even if it was merely transposed from Travis Bickle.

At 138 minutes, the film could use more scenes between Sullivan and Arthur teasing out their tentative dynamic or between Lee and Arthur that aren’t simply another disjointed soundtrack cue. By the time it arrives at an insultingly dopey and bro-ish resolution that evokes a Say Anything … line from behind the Gas ‘n’ Sip only without the satirical punchline, Joker: Folie à Deux cements itself as both musical and misfire, with nothing bewitching, bothering or bewildering about it.