"Joker: Folie à Deux" - This will be called a masterpiece in a few years, trust me

Josh
Dec 16, 2024
8 min read

Updated: Dec 18, 2024

Todd Phillips (2024)

Well, it's not quite a musical and it's not quite a drama but man...

Here is a review from Ana V on Letterboxd which should just be my whole review, “This is like when the mediocre kid somehow got 100% on a test but everyone knew it was just because he copied the actual smart kid but then the smart kid changed seats so he went on to get 0.5% on the next test because he couldn't rip anyone off anymore.” The career of Todd Philips is varied but not in a Stanley Kubrick or Michael Haneke style of varied where you can see their style evolve and strengthen with each film and genre they improve. But varied as in jumping from the desperate tail end of 2000’s gross-out boner comedies with Road Trip (2003). To smash hit broad comedy Hangover (2009) that slowly devolved into a strange crime drama by the third instalment in the trilogy. And then a billion dollar cultural phenomenon, taking the world by storm before the film had even been released. With the media calling it an uprising for GamersTM and basement dwelling incel… who will… leave their room and do something (do people know who they're talking about?) But for most people the reaction would’ve been that it was a pretty good movie or wondering why they were watching a worse version of The King of Comedy (1982) and Taxi Driver (1976). For me it didn’t really say much of anything, it didn’t challenge any preconception I had on its subject matter of mental illness and power of elites, or do anything different to the films that “inspired” it to stand out. Apart from the ending which was relatively well done, the general vibe of the cinematography and a performance by Joaquin Phoenix that carried that movie. And with something as big as The Joker, it was clear that a sequel was on the horizon but what made me raise my eyebrow was hearing whispers that it was going to be a musical. With Lady Gaga coming in as a co-star, I was intrigued… but then I forgot about it because the first movie didn’t hype me up enough to care about a second film. And after watching Phoenix's fever dream (yes, he had a dream about Joker being a musical), I can say without a doubt, I would much rather go back and watch the bootleg Scorsese film than sit through this again. As I loosely breakdown some story beats, I hope it paints a picture of how all over and half baked these ideas are. And how they stack on top of each other to form a bland experience.

What happens when you give full creative control to someone who copied off someone else's homework to create a hit film, while refusing to talk to the company that owns the characters you're borrowing(Note that the DC logo doesn’t appear until almost the final frame of the movie), or take notes from the new talented head of DC films James Gunn? Well, you get a mixed, confused, bloated, jukebox musical. Taking place a few years after the brain blowing events of The Joker, we start Folie à Deux with a pretty well done Loony Toons style animated cartoon. Which loosely recaps the ending of Joker, where the shadow of Arthur (Phoenix) takes on the mantle of the Joker who performs all the violent events. Setting up the core theme of the film, double identity, who is the real you, is the Joker a different personality sprouting from the true humble Arthur. Which could be an interesting angle to take but instead the movie fluffs around with out of place musical numbers and while taking a sharp turn to attempt to focus on what does the Joker represent. Is it about the man or the idea?

We see Arthurs daily life in Arkham where his lawyer, played by Catherine Keener, is pleading to get him moved out of Arkham to a better hospital where he can be treated for multiple personality disorder. As she believes that the person we saw in the first movie was a personality created from the Arthurs troubled upbringing. And this is more or less the first half of the movie. He then meets Lee, played by Gaga, who mimics the handgun suicide in the hallway from the first movie while in a singing class. To which Arthur is offered to join by the tough security guard, Brendan Gleeson, for seemingly no reason.

This is where we get some of the meta aspects of the movie. Lee keeps talking about how much she adores the Joker and her obsession with the TV movie about him, (which is why she knew about the handgun hallway moment) while everyone else makes comments about it being terrible. She essentially plays the audience from the first movie, in love with the idea of the Joker and what he stood for but ignoring the actual mental illness subtext. As they share some musical numbers (we’ll get to them), she’s shown to be able to sweet talk her way through guards where they share an intimate moment in a holding cell to let him know that she’s being pulled from Arkham as ordered by her mother. To briefly touch on pacing, at this point I was wondering where the movie was actually going. I checked the time and calculated that we had a ton of time left but it felt like we had barely done anything to progress the plot to the essential point of the movie that is debuted in the form of a courtroom drama. Is The Joker and Arthur Fleck the same person?

And it wasn’t until this second half where I actually found myself more engaged. As the cheers and boos between two protesting groups create this fantasy in the mind of Arthur that he is in the right, a martyr that will create another uprising within Gotham. A mountain from a hill, as they say (sing). We see Lee and supporters almost push Arthur to become full Joker in the courtroom as he fires his lawyer to defend himself against Harvey Dent who is focused on seeing him fry in the chair. It’s revealed that Lee has been lying and committed herself with a psychology background to get closer to Arthur, but that had very little impact on anything. It's questioned by Arthur yet she sweet talks him again to let him know it's fine. Almost like the reverse of how Joker and Quinn came to be a duo. There’s this desperate attempt of validation Arthur is seeking from his supporters and Lee. Yet the movie takes another turn, as Arthur in his Joker get up stops his southern drawl to admit that it was all him. There is no joker and he is in the wrong. And I feel like I would’ve felt that weight of this moment if more of the movie was this courtroom drama, building up to the breakdown with frequent back and forth evidence of him denying the split between the two personalities. Though they are interrupted by an explosion hitting the court house, as Joker stumbles out and a group of fan boys run over and throw him into the back of the car. Another layer of the meta quality where it feels like Todd is making fun of the audience who looked up to the character from the first movie. Arthur lies on the back of the seat and listens as the man dressed as him keeps talking about how they’re gonna make the city pay only to have Arthur then desperately jump out of the car and run away. We then finally wrap up this slog of a movie with Arthur back in Arkham state. And I was blankly looking at the screen wondering, what was the point of this?

So did Todd Phillips make a movie that was an insult to fans of the first movie? He seemed to revel in showing fans of Joker as pathetic. Like he’s trying to tell us, “This is who you look up too? Really?” And to top it off, he made it a musical that I’m sure 98% of that audience would’ve hated. Because even if that 2% liked musicals, this isn’t a very good one. First of all, the singing isn’t very good at all. Even from Gaga, the majority of the songs are just soft spoken mumbles. A mumblecore musical. With musicals I do like I often think of contrasting music where the actor can show off their vocal range that blends with the emotional moments of a scene but in Folie à Deux there is little variety in the songs. And that’s despite it being a jukebox musical. And the songs should push the story forward or really highlight the conflict of a scene, yet the songs here just felt random. Like there was little to no motivation for the character to actually start singing, they just seem to do it and then we’re back to reality. Which is another rule that they break as with musicals there is normally a clear split between reality and the music world. When all the commuters on the way to work all jump out of their cars and sing with their gridlocking neighbour at the start of La La Land (2016), I know that everyone passing by will just see it as gridlock as by the end of the song everyone is right back to where they started in their car. Got it. In Once (2006) when Girl (Markéta Irglová) is listening to the sample track and begins to improve lyrics over the top to form a song on the fly only to have people look at her for singing in public, I know that all music is diegetic. Got it. There were points in Folie à Deux where a song would break out and people would acknowledge or sing-along with him while in other scenes we would hard cut back to Arthur’s moment right before breaking out into song and dance. Or we would cut away from the location to be in a stylised version of reality. I never felt like I could understand the split between his fantasy musical world and what was happening in the real world.

Regardless of what I mentioned at the start, I feel the first movie is leagues above this one in terms of what it was trying to say and doing it way more simply and effectively. Relative to its sequel, beyond that I don’t think it was amazing. But even thinking back to the first movie I think of the gross streets of Gotham, the riots of the uprising poor, the shallow focused close ups, and funny enough, the dancing sequences. Yet, with 3.5 times the cost of the first movie ($55 Million for Joker, $190 Million for the sequel and that's not factoring marketing budgets), I never felt that level of gravitas. When one of the themes is around the influence of the idea the Joker represents, it never felt like we saw the extent of said influence. Even the musical numbers don’t have anything extravagant to justify the budget, it really just ends up being someone dancing in the same location we’ve already seen them in. To bring back La La Land again, I would prefer to see them go extreme into fantasy like the dance in the planetarium. Just to make our main two locations, Arkham hospital and the courtroom, just a bit more interesting. Especially with a musical.

With an 81% audience drop off in box off draw, it’s not surprising that upon seeing it why. It’s amazing to see how such an impactful character in pop-culture could fall so fast. This is a movie that will either A. Be forgotten about and when people mention Joker they will either think of Heather Ledger or the 2019 film. Or B. In a couple of years time will be revived as a “misunderstood masterpiece” right when they’re about to announce a sequel or another Batman movie with another version of the character. But for me this A. It was forgettable and the only time this will enter my mind again is when someone mentions, “Hey do you remember that Joker musical?” Even as I write this after only seeing it a day again, I cannot really remember much of what actually happened. Nothing stood out. Like the character of Arthur Fleck, this movie was average at best that just blended in with the rest of mediocre comic films.