Yes No Maybe So: Joaquin Phoenix is "Joker
Friday, August 30, 2019 at 8:20AM
by Tony Ruggio
The internet’s been aflush with grousing over Todd Phillips’ upcoming Joker, a boiling pot of loyal DC fanboys and girls versus cinephile crusaders. Stir the pot with critics and pundits who have read an early draft of the script (why do that?) and the discourse, pre-discourse, and twee little jokes about discourse have been headache-inducing. I don’t care so much for pearl-clutching over what the film’s worldview might be... judging films on such things, particularly before anyone has seen one minute of finished film, is unfair to art and the place it occupies in pop culture. It’s not a filmmaker’s responsibility to coddle a country or avoid uncomfortable points of view.
That being said, there are pre-existing mixed feelings, and the final trailer only exacerbates them…
YES
• “All I have are negative thoughts.” Joaquin Phoenix is one of our best working actors today and he can imbue even the most basic psychological tics and tropes with something more. And that LAUGH.
• Lawrence Sher, just off of murky Godzilla: King of the Monsters, has stepped up his game as DP and seems to have delivered a very textured, filmic canvas for Phoenix to play in, a welcome reprieve from Marvel’s grays and green screens.
• MAKEUP. The Joker that paints his face is more interesting than the Joker who didn’t choose to look that way.
NO
• The similarities to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy are no longer enticing, they’re evoking a lack of inspiration. Don’t forget Scorsese was once attached and then bailed. Not a good sign.
• Bullying, economic anxiety, mental illness, an ailing parent. I have no issue with the moral implications of Joker as protagonist resembling real-world psychos. I have an issue with turning Joker into, more or less, your garden-variety psych case of sicko.
MAYBE SO
• High possibility of psychological clunkiness. Too vague and Joker comes off underwritten. Too specific yet told in broad strokes and Joker comes off like a dimestore shrink’s idea of psychosis. Specificity is often botched (see Bullseye in Season 3 of Daredevil). Can Phillips and co. achieve the right balance?
• Is it just me or is the Joker played out? Maybe I’m just getting old, but we’ve already seen four different iterations of this character on screen, five if you count Mask of the Phantasm. There’s a limit to how many times a character should be redone or re-imagined for the movies and Jokers may have reached that limit with Jared Leto.
Final Verdict: Maybe So. We’ll see. Todd Phillips is somewhat underrated, but does he have it in him?
Reader Comments (39)
I don't know if the movie will be any good, but these are two of the best trailers (especially the first) I have seen in recent years.
For the record, no mother ever has said "Would you please stop bothering my kid" to a stranger making the kid laugh. Never.
And that may sound like a ridiculously small criticism, but it feels like an artificially dark world view, y'know?
Nihilistic crap.
I'll allow this if we can have an angsty antiheroic Catwoman movie with Keri Russell.
Did we really need another movie that can easily be used by MRAs / incels / white supremacists to romanticize their own radicalization? HARD pass.
An angsty antiheroic Catwoman movie with Keri Russell sounds so much more interesting.
What Sean Diego and Deborah Lipp said. This movie seems to be going out of its way to make the Joker a sympathetic antihero in the most disingenuous of ways. Sometimes a villain is just a villain, and we don't need to know why.
I didn't realize I needed Keri Russel as Catwoman until I read this thread, and now it's all I can think of.
Phoenix is a truly gifted actor, so it will be hard for me to pass this up. At the same time, I have no interest in this character, so I'll probably do what most do - watch it on streaming.
This seems to be a concept in search of a purpose—a raison d'être, as it were. It also points to the central problem of "origin" stories. I mean, why is it necessary to unpack every comic book (or fairy tale) character? That's not only fan fiction, but a distraction/detraction from the original creator's true intent.
The Joker trailer(s) is very effectively cut, so kudos on that.
Straight people... get away from me!
Mareko: Yeah, that's the thing. Nolan went with Joker where he did, primarily to complement a hyper-real (probably even absurdly hyper-real) vision of Batman. What's this doing? The trailer implies a formless mash-up of elements of Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, The Sopranos and Fight Club, but with little to none of the wit or pathos of any of those. Also: I doubt I'm done with Joker, but I think I'm done with the whole "knives and bombs" vision of Joker. This is our fourth straight live-action version of that (Ledger, Monaghan, Leto, Phoenix) and, sorry, if this is the only way live-action people want to do Joker, perhaps it IS time to retire him from live-action and do someone else.
I am so bored by superhero/villain movies. Why bother?
MAYBE SO for all the reasons you stated. I'm particularly worried about what Sean Diego said.
YES to angsty Catwoman played by Keri Russell. How do we make that happen?
Yes to angsty Keri Russell as Catwoman! Oh we need that film and brush away the Halle Berry trauma
Peggy, you're a hoot!
I find superhero movies very boring and I'm not a big fan of different actors playing the same character in the same stories (remakes).
But i find interesting that an actor does a development of a previously played character in a different context and judging by the trailer is exactly what Joaquin Phoenix does in the film so is a yes for me.
Now, as for the Keri Russell as Catwoman pitch? Oh, boy. YES.
YES. It looks amazing, and I am no superhero fan. Phoenix looks great.
I don't think it's particularly fair to draw some of the conclusions which have been drawn in these comments until the film has screened, at least. Different strokes for different folks. Let's hope for now it doesn't go down that murky road!
Keri Russell as Catwoman... OH FUCK YEAH!!!!!
After watching this trailer, it is definitely clear that Joaquin is taking that overrated, pretentious wannabe Jared Leto to school.
And Leto is a cunt. Elijah Wood is right, 30 Seconds to Mars do fucking suck!
@Deborah Lipp
A single mom on a bus very much has heighten paranoia on the people surrounding she and her child. She doesn't want her child too worked up. Sit still and quiet till we reach our destination. Much too much as been made of this moment including someone writing that the actress being fat and Black is a continuation of the mammy trope. I'll defend the dramatic realism of the scene.
No- I really do not want to see this- yes the trailer is well made but seriously NO
Do we have a link to the actual trailer we are talking about here?
I'll pass this one.
I just don't want this anywhere near awards season.
travis - apologies. I had embedded it but somehow it didn't code right so it's here now.
It's interesting how so many on the left went from a stance of "criminals are human beings, too, and many of them can trace their anti-social behavior back to terrible, unenviable experiences they've suffered," to this: "criminals are toxic, evil people who deserve no compassion and no understanding. Lock them up forever," or, at the very least "ostracize them so even after they've served their time, they can't work." It's sad. I feel like if Tim Robbins made "Dead Man Walking" today, there would be no audience. Even the progressives would we screaming for Sean Penn to be strapped to the electric chair.
"I'll allow this if we can have an angsty antiheroic Catwoman movie with Keri Russell." - H
I gasped. I'm weeping this is not a real thing. Imagine that being pushed for festivals and awards consideration.
I'm exhausted by the Joker.
I don't remember anything about the trailer now that H mentioned the possibility of Keri Russel playing Catwoman, that's all I can think about. I guess I don't have to debate whether or not I should rewatch the six seasons of "The Americans" after all!
That being said I'm a Maybe so verging on a No for "Joker". Yes for Phoenix because he never disappoints (though I wasn't impressed by his performance in "You were never really here"), but the trailer is confusing (and not in an enticing kinda way): is the movie a thriller, a political/social drama? A two-and-a-half-minute montage was probably all I needed. Will wait for TFE review to really make up my mind, though.
Daniella - That's a huge stretch. Hell or High Water was a big surprise hit, I expect Hustlers will be very popular, Widows had a lot of fans, and plenty of people thought Killmonger was more sympathetic than Black Panther. We also live in an era when practically all the Democratic candidates oppose the death penalty, versus the 1990s, when Bill Clinton made sure he left the campaign trail to oversee an execution of a mentally disabled man.
Sometimes a movie just looks obnoxious.
Everyone—meow!
And Daniella’s point about Dead Man Walking is spot-on. You could never make a movie designed to humanize someone *guilty* of those particular heinous crimes today, without a progressive meltdown. Plenty of movies about the wrongly convicted/accused. Plenty about people guilty of generalized, anonymous or professionalized violence, as in these supervillain movies. But Penn’s character, ideology, crimes, and those flashback scenes would utterly disqualify him from the humanity Prejean, Robbins, Penn and Sarandon aimed to reveal in ‘95. The project would be “canceled” on sight.
Well, Okay, Suzanne, but the films you mention are in the "Bonnie and Clyde" cool, fun criminal tradition. That's different from humanistic work that shows compassion for and attempts to understand truly nasty rapists and murderers and so on. Do you think anyone would make IN COLD BLOOD today? No way. People can't even wrap their heads around the thought that Woody Allen might, you know, be innocent of molesting his daughter since the authorities came up with nothing and the girl's story was inconsistent. Everyone's out for blood, even on the left, even when there's no proof of guilt. It's a sad time.
H and Daniella - I haven't seen Clemency yet, but it sure sounds like the type of movie you're talking about.
Clemency is a little low budget film focusing on understanding the emotional experiences of a warden, not the criminals. It's not at all what I'm talking about.
Quite a bit of pearl clutching in these comments...
Movie will be shit though.
@ Daniella and H.
Interesting point of view. I usually interpret these kind of stories only as a character development; not to justify his evilness but to know his inner world that becomes a climax.
An opposite example could be Dancer in the Dark, where the personality of the character is what brings her to that end.
Something curious is that when the trailer of Chicuarotes was released, some people joked that it was the mexican version of Joker but in fact the lead actor of the mexican film did a good job with the development of an 'evil' character which is what (i guess) are trying to do with Joker.
Well, what do I know, César? :) I'm one of the few people who actually liked Rob Zombie's "Halloween" better than John Carpenter's, because it made the radical statement that the Michael Myers of the world aren't inhuman monsters who've been shat out of Lucifer's ass, but all-too-human people who've suffered terrible childhoods and/or early traumatic experiences and/or chemical imbalances, people who, in some ways, have been failed by a society that makes it easier to get a gun (or a butcher knife) than good psychological help. But more and more, people want to think of them as inhuman monsters. Vermin to be eradicated. In the latest version of "Halloween," they rewrote the mythology so that Michael isn't even Laurie's brother any more. We can't have an evil monster be the flesh and blood sibling of a human character we like, can we? That plot twist in the first sequel was all too morally complicated. Don't get me wrong: I hate the celebrations of toxic masculinity and violence we get in appalling films like "A Clockwork Orange" and "Straw Dogs", but the thought that a humanized Joker is beyond the pale seems, frankly, a little fascistic to me. Again, the most depressing thing is we're starting to see it on the left, usually from middle class white feminists who should know better.
@ Daniella
You mention: "We can't have an evil monster be the flesh and blood sibling of a human character we like, can we?" my answer is: absolutely yes, we can; because both of them are part of a common element (in these case a family) and the primary idea of balance is that two opposite elements (good and evil, black and white etc.) could fight each other but in fact both are part of the same thing and even could learn one to another.... that, and the fact that in the reality these kind of stories been happened many times.
Sometimes the elements of the stories are getting put in forms that can be interpretated in different ways and that´s the greatest beauty of the art: is not absolute and someone can percibe things that some other don´t.
I get your point and i like how you argument your ideas, i just love to debate and to know different ways of thinking.
I wonder if Joker was not based on a character we already know some people would be more interested in the movie.
When I say "we can't have that," I'm saying a reactionary or fascist "can't have that". To them evil is always "the Other," outside of our group, threatening us.
Yes! Phoenix is winning the Oscar for this role.