Review | Joker: Folie à Deux

Todd Phillips must think he’s either died and gone to heaven or is perpetually living in hell. The better part of a decade ago, the filmmaker behind The Hangover films had an axe to grind. He wanted to make comedies, but was becoming all too aware that comedies were no longer profitable at the box office; to his frustration, one of the only kinds of entertainment that people would still actually leave their house to see was the comic book movie, a genre that he hated. He began crafting Joker, a resentful satire of the comic book film, pulling DC’s most-known villain out of the pages of comics and dropping him whole cloth into the world of Martin Scorsese. In fact, he even approached Scorsese to help make the film, noting that it would be a meta-commentary on the ouvre of the man who invented the 1970s urban psychotic and thus a whole sub-genre. Scorsese ultimately declined..and don’t think that didn’t add fuel to the fire.

Fast forward to 2019. Joker, conceived as the anti-comic-book movie,  debuts to smash box office numbers and eventually becomes the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever until it was dethroned by Deadpool and Wolverine. Joaquin Phoenix, a fragile actor who struggles with the spotlight and seeks to subvert fame at every opportunity, has become an unlikely household name. In an interview with one of the major network magazine television shows (a format that Joker sees as being artificial and harmful) Phoenix confessed that he doesn’t really want to be an actor at all, but feels like he has to carry on the talent and potential of his deceased brother, River. How complicated this all must be for Phillips and Phoenix, now that their anarchic piece of cinematic insurrection has become part of the status quo. An angry society on the cusp of riot has embraced the film not as satire, but as the genuine article. What is there left to do but push the joke even further? 

Joker: Folie à Deux is that joke spread to its absolute breaking point. One might think that there was nothing left to say after the first film, which pretty much exhausted its premise by the time the credits rolled. Ah, but by borrowing another fanboy favorite, Harley Quinn, and transplanting her from the worlds of DC Comics into Scorsese Land, a fresh story emerges. And Harley, played by the infinitely-talented Lady Gaga, does indeed inject quite a bit of new life into what could have been repetitive and stale. The film’s subtitle, which translates into “a shared madness,” ups the ante by giving Arthur Fleck the one thing that he didn’t have in the first film: sympathetic love—or at least what he thinks is love. 



Gaga brings dark beauty to this story, a feeling of hope born out of insanity. These characters are brutal, broken people that we should not aspire to be; and yet, in the hands of Phillips, Joker and Harley become so stylized and treated with such outlaw-cool that we can’t help but be attracted to them. Gaga is a real-life rock star, and Phoenix, with his heroin chic and sunken features, feels like he stepped out of an album cover, circa 1977. These Natural Born Killers belong on the cover of the Rolling Stone. 

Todd Phillips knows this. He’s seen his perverse tale become beloved—a smash hit and his greatest success—and part of Joker: Folie à Deux feels like Phillips and co-screenwriter Scott Silver stripping away any mystique these characters have, while also allowing them their own private fantasies. With no less than 16 musical performances—some simple, some as elaborately staged as the great MGM classics from the 1940s—this is as ambitious of a musical film as La La Land. These broad flights of fancy make it that much more brutal when we inevitably crash back down to earth. 

Joker: Folie à Deux is—to borrow a comic book title—brave and bold. It does what the audience least expects, takes us places we didn’t plan to go. If the first Joker film was a breakout smash that turned its character into an icon, Phillips is quick to disarm our fascination, but he doesn’t do it without giving us something else in return. 


My biggest complaint about the first film is that it seeks to critique and satirize the comic book movie as a commercial product, but in doing so, it became a commercial product itself. Phillips seems to have been bothered too, because this film opens with an animated WB short, a la Tex Avery, starring Joker. As he struts down the red carpet, cigarette dangling from his fingers, the crowd goes wild. The broken little monster has become a bonafide star, but that’s not how it was supposed to be. In Joker 2, Phillips lets us know what he thinks about that unexpected fame and sets things right. 



I am profoundly impressed with this film--one of the best of the year, truly--but I hope this is the end. Todd Phillips has said that he has no plans to make any more Joker movies (we’ll see), even though he’s open to the idea of these characters continuing in future Warner Bros. films. It’s quite a conundrum: he’s found the biggest success of his entire career by making movies about something he actively dislikes, and in doing so has become the very thing he once railed against. Arthur Fleck would find that irony to be very, very funny.