Film review: Joker: Folie à Deux

With 2019’s Joker, Todd Phillips told the story of the titular comic supervillain in the most uncomic fashion. He didn’t even present him as that much of a villain. Rather, it was an often sympathetic account of down-on-his-luck clown Arthur Fleck finding himself struggling to simply exist from one day to the next, as his loneliness, deteriorating mental health, increasing detachment from reality and his difficulty connecting with other people lead to murder, eventually planning a coup de grace on live TV.

It was closer to Taxi Driver than Jared Leto’s cartoonish, OTT Joker in Suicide Squad. Gotham was presented as 1970s New York, all dirt and petty crime and bleakness and sleaze and poverty. It was a cold, uncaring dump, the street violence that sat in the background mundane in its regularity and pointlessness.

The film challenged the viewer with the question of how it’s possible to feel for a clearly troubled and sad person, while they’re also doing self-evidently terrible things. Joaquin Phoenix managed to walk this line perfectly, giving dynamite performances of both the twisted reality of how Joker imagines things to be, and the confused, sick person Arthur actually is. He earned a Best Actor Oscar for it, while the movie grossed over a $1 billion.

The breadcrumbs about the follow-up made it sound like it would have a streak of even darker humour than the first did at points. It would, it was said, be a sinister musical, with Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn (here under the character's real name Harleen 'Lee' Quinzel), following the pair as they fall in love in Arkham hospital. As a way to continue the story after such a triumph first time around, it was a suitably just-crazy-enough-to-work proposition.

It doesn’t go quite far enough. Most frustratingly, it frequently looks like it could. And it’s a promising set-up: Arthur is in custody, awaiting trial for his murders when he meets Lee in a music therapy group. Quickly, they become sweet on one another, and she soon reveals herself to be as dangerous as he is, as well as something of a Devil on his shoulder.

What you expect is that the two get out of Arkham and go on a Bonnie & Clyde-styled caper together where they sing their heads off while shivving people who didn’t have it coming, kissing on top of burning police cars, that sort of thing. Instead, it's all about Arthur’s trial, which hinges on proving that Joker is a completely separate personality and, thus, the one responsible for the killings. Sadly, this isn’t intense or dramatic or interesting enough to stop the whole thing feeling like it goes on forever without delivering a lethal blow.

It’s a shame, because there is brilliance scattered throughout. Joaquin Phoenix and Gaga are superb together, a believable double-act that manage to traverse flamboyance and rawness immaculately. She, in particular, puts in a cracker of a turn. Lee is mad, bad and dangerous to know, whispering in Arthur’s ear how great he is, but she’s also a toxic catastrophe, leading him on, lying and giving him terrible ideas (like firing his lawyer).

The musical element works gloriously. Again, there are times when the songs are surreal and larger-than-life in a fantastical world of delusions, like the dream sequences in The Big Lebowski, and others where Arthur simply begins singing in the inmate TV room. Obviously, as the greatest pop star of her time, Gaga nails it, but it’s pleasing just how good a singer and dancer her partner is, even next to her. In these moments, the agony and ecstasy of what could have been is writ large. In keeping with the old-school filmmaking, it’s proper golden-age of Hollywood stuff, with the performances only enhanced by having actually sung the songs live during filming.

The action, likewise, is great. Early on, Lee underlines what she’s inside for when she gets bored and destroys the prison wing. Elsewhere, the frequent, sudden beatings Arthur endures from guards who moments before had been bantering with him, are powerfully unpleasant.

It’s the gaps between these set-piece moments that mean the whole thing doesn’t quite rise as it should. The court scenes aren’t as compelling or thought-provoking as intended, with none of the original’s tension or fever-dream weirdness. The ever-revealing truth about Lee isn’t used enough (in fact, for all her time on screen, Gaga still feels underused in general). An appearance by Steve Coogan as smarmy TV journalist Paddy Meyers, out to wrong-foot Arthur, is basically one of his dinner-table impressions from The Trip. If it’s hard to get Alan Partridge out of your head, Gaga singing The Carpenters’ Close To You moments later makes it impossible.

It does manage to make you think on how you feel about Arthur, albeit nowhere near as profoundly as the first time. The perspective sneakily changes from damaged man in need of help, to callous murderer, to naïve idiot in over his head, to liar, to a reflection of his surroundings and experience, to nasty danger. The face-painted Stans outside the courthouse who have decided what they love about him and hold him up as a freedom-fighting rock star, ignoring everything else about him, is a prescient commentary on the dangers of the cult of personality.

Even so, Folie à Deux promised, and could have been, so much more. The parts are all there. You just wish it was a bit more Gaga.

Verdict: 3/5

Joker: Folie à Deux is released on October 4 via Warner Bros