Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

October 10, 2024 2:32 PM

Arthur Fleck is institutionalized at Arkham, awaiting trial for his crimes as Joker. While struggling with his dual identity, Arthur not only stumbles upon true love, but also finds the music that's always been inside him.
posted by TheophileEscargot (9 comments total)

So hollow. So empty. It made me feel bad for the actors and several departments in the crew. So much work that didn't add up to anything for me.

I can't remember what reviewer said this but someone noted that they'd rather watch the mess that is Megalopolis multiple times rather than watch this just once, and I have to say I agree.
posted by queensissy at 3:51 PM on October 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

Yes, it was disappointing. Even the dream sequence musical numbers were small-scale and unimaginative: how many times did Joaquin Phoenix lean back and puff cigarette into the air, a dozen? Seemed a bit of a waste of Lady Gaga as imaginative spectacle is one thing she can do well.

Brendan Gleeson as the prison guard was a bright spot though. The character seemed horribly plausible as a bully who's genuinely convinced he's a nice guy for the limited favours he doles out.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:45 PM on October 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

I agree about Brendan Gleeson. Also Gary Puddles was genuinely moving.
posted by queensissy at 10:48 AM on October 11, 2024 [1 favorite]

Folie à Deux isn’t even the most successful murder-clown movie in theaters this weekend.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 2:58 PM on October 12, 2024

Guardian: Why did Joker 2 lose so much money? And how on earth did it cost so much in the first place?

Phillips evidently wanted to course-correct after accusations that he had indulged toxic fandom in the first film. Having Arthur Fleck definitively dismiss the Joker as a pathetic psychological crutch certainly gets his point across.

But chastising the fanbase so openly is tantamount to box office self-harm (probably why the director refused to test-screen Joker: Folie à Deux). The impunity of a $300m budget seems to have led Phillips to mistake this for an auteur film, and shooting during a period of regime change at both Warner and DC reportedly allowed him to operate with weak oversight...

The film’s nosedive will have repercussions for the still-floundering DC and beyond. This kind of overly conceptual punt will surely become verboten in blockbusters for some time, and you wonder if it will force more conservative reimaginings of other returning icons, particularly Bond.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:34 PM on October 16, 2024

I got less than an hour in and gave up. Phillips gave up his cribbed Scorseseisms for a series of musical numbers connected by basically nothing at all; it's like watching a can being kicked down the road, and I'm led to believe that there's no real payoff at the end. The photography is often quite striking, with the lines in Phoenix's face standing out and often making him look like a pre-beard Abraham Lincoln, and Phoenix and Gaga's second meeting makes me wonder what they might have been able to do in just about any other movie than this one.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:39 PM on December 27, 2024

For some reason, I started watching it again, and yeah--that was time well wasted.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:07 AM on December 28, 2024

I wanted to say a little more about this movie; I've been going for some long walks over the holidays and have thought a bit more about this. Per what the Guardian reviewer above said, it seems like Phillips may have had the intention of "course-correct"ing, and I'll grant him that; the movie has some similarities to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, a movie that I liked even less than this one, but Phillips doesn't seem to have the same admiration for Fleck the way that Stone seemed to have for Mickey and Mallory.

But he still puts in a lot of things that simply don't make sense; after Fleck fires his lawyer, he represents himself, getting to roam around the courtroom--not seemingly a very good idea for someone accused of brutal murders; a similar scene in Natural Born Killers ended up getting cut from the theatrical release of that film. Arkham Hospital is a place where the inmates don't have toilets in their cells, but they are allowed not only to smoke but to keep their own matches and lighters, the better to set the music room piano on fire (there are apparently also no fire extinguishers there, either). No one thinks to block off the streets around the courthouse even though the defendant has sparked numerous incidents of violent unrest in Gotham. This version of Harvey Dent seems barely old enough to shave. I half expected to find out at the end that Arthur had imagined almost all of this film and most of the previous one, but instead we get the implication that, whoops, maybe the other guy was the "real" Joker all along. Very meta, with the whole thing ending up being a bad joke.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:29 PM on December 29

I found myself surprised by really liking this film; I think it reads very differently in a post-Mangione world and also if you think of it as more of an art film about the psychology of Flick. It’s not a typical Joker movie, it just pretends to be at first to lure you in.
posted by corb at 6:13 PM on January 3