["Joker" is bold reinvention of superhero cinema and about the
dehumanizing effect of a capitalistic system that greases the economic
ladder, blurring the line between private wealth and personal worth
until life itself loses its absolute value. ] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘JOKER’ REVIEW: FOR BETTER OR WORSE, SUPERHERO MOVIES WILL NEVER
BE THE SAME  
[[link removed]]


 

David Erlich
August 31, 2019
IndieWire
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ "Joker" is bold reinvention of 'superhero cinema' and about the
dehumanizing effect of a capitalistic system that greases the economic
ladder, blurring the line between private wealth and personal worth
until life itself loses its absolute value. _

"Joker",

 

Todd Phillips’ “Joker [[link removed]]” is
unquestionably the boldest reinvention of “superhero” cinema since
“The Dark Knight”; a true original that’s sure to be remembered
as one of the most transgressive studio blockbusters of the 21st
Century. It’s also a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels, and
a hyper-familiar origin story so indebted to “Taxi Driver” and
“The King of Comedy” that Martin Scorsese probably deserves an
executive producer credit. It’s possessed by the kind of provocative
spirit that’s seldom found in _any _sort of mainstream
entertainment, but also directed by a glorified edgelord who lacks the
discipline or nuance to responsibly handle such hazardous material,
and who reliably takes the coward’s way out of the narrative’s
most critical moments.

“Joker” is the human-sized and adult-oriented comic book movie
that Marvel critics have been clamoring for — there’s no action,
no spandex, no obvious visual effects, and the whole thing is so
gritty and serious that DCEU fanboys will feel as if they’ve died
and seen the Snyder Cut — but it’s also the worst-case scenario
for the rest of the film world, as it points towards a grim future in
which the inmates have taken over the asylum, and even the most
repulsive of mid-budget character studies can be massive hits (and
Oscar contenders) so long as they’re at least tangentially related
to some popular intellectual property. The next “Lost in
Translation” will be about Black Widow and Howard Stark spending a
weekend together at a Sokovia hotel; the next “Carol” will be an
achingly beautiful period drama about young Valkyrie falling in love
with a blonde woman she meets in an Asgardian department store.

“Joker” is a movie about a homicidal narcissist who feels entitled
to the world’s attention — a man who’d rather kill for a good
laugh than allow the world to treat him like its punchline. It’s
also a movie about the dehumanizing effects of a capitalistic system
that greases the economic ladder, blurring the line between private
wealth and personal worth until life itself loses its absolute value.
Phillips, whose cinematic legacy was previously defined by the
“Hangover” trilogy and that scene in “Road Trip” where he cast
himself as a random creep who sucks on Amy Smart’s toes, has made a
film that is somehow all of these things at once: It’s a visionary,
twisted, paradigm-shifting tour de force _and _a bar-lowering mess
of moral incoherence. It’s nothing less (and nothing more) than an
agent of unbridled chaos. And we haven’t even gotten to Joaquin
Phoenix [[link removed]] yet, whose
hypnotic and inimitable performance would feel completely new if it
didn’t borrow so much from his past work. If Freddie Quell and
Theodore Twombly stepped into the teleportation machine from “The
Fly,” Arthur Fleck is who they would mutate into. Living in the
margins of an early ’80s Gotham City that was rotting long before
the garbage workers started their ongoing strike, the Pagliacci-esque
Arthur is first introduced as he stares into a mirror and paints on
the makeup that he’s forced to wear for his miserable day job; even
in a room full of self-loathing clowns, this guy still feels like a
special kind of sad. Emaciated and rippling at the same time, Arthur
looks like a werewolf who got interrupted mid-transformation (which
might explain his stringy mop of wet black hair).

He’s one of the downtrodden — one of God’s unfortunate
creatures. And just to make things worse, he suffers from a
Pseudobulbar affect, which results in uncontrollable episodes of
hysterical laughter (he carries a laminated card that he hands out to
apathetic strangers who look at him askance, a ritual that would make
anyone feel sorry for themselves). If Christopher Nolan’s Joker was
an inscrutable force of nature, Phillips’ couldn’t be more human
— all of his eccentricities are explicitly diagnosed. That
literalness has its virtues, but it can also be insufferable; Phillips
blurs fantasy and reality in the same way that Scorsese did in “The
King of Comedy,” but he insists on doubling back and drawing a clear
line between fact and fiction. It’s one of the many ways that
“Joker” poses as a movie worthy of serious thought, but lacks the
courage to behave like one.

Phoenix, meanwhile, follows his own muse wherever the hell he wants.
Once the Joker bleeds through, he becomes mesmerically unpredictable.
The essence of Phoenix’s performance — and the most lucid example
of why it’s a worthy complement to Heath Ledger’s lip-smacking,
carnival-esque take on the character — is that it’s always hard
to tell if Arthur is laughing or crying, or which reaction would make
the most sense. Who among us can’t relate?

Gotham is overrun with super rats, Trumpian billionaire Thomas Wayne
is running for office and claiming that he’s the only one who can
help the city’s poor, and Arthur’s mom (Frances Conroy) still
insists on calling her son “Happy” because she sees his condition
as evidence that he “was put here to spread joy and laughter.” The
world is a joke, and it’s on him. But Arthur is so close to turning
things around — he just has to realize that his life is actually a
comedy (easier said than done in a movie so desperate to be taken
seriously that it can’t afford to have a sense of humor).

Maybe he can become a comedian, like his hero Murray Franklin: Robert
De Niro, graduating from Rupert Pupkin to Jerry Lewis’s Jerry
Langford, plays the late night TV show host as a savage parody of Jay
Leno. The extended Batman universe, so fascinated by masks and other
layers of unreality, has always been attuned to the way that lonely
Americans forge most of their connections through television, and
“Joker” is at its best when digging into that particular darkness.
But Arthur is too isolated to understand what makes other people
laugh. In his journal/joke diary, he scrawls that “the worst part
about having a mental illness is that people expect you to behave as
though you don’t.” Anyone with a heart can sympathize with that,
and anyone with a similar history can probably see themselves
reflected in those words. Arthur is established as a poor soul, not a
pariah, and Phillips is fooling himself if he thinks the rest of the
movie does enough to muddy the water.

On both a personal and a political scale, “Joker” finds that
things in this world need to be very, very bad before people can
actually be bothered to change them. Trauma is transformative. Arthur
doesn’t hit bottom until three drunken finance bros attack him on
the subway, and he kills them in self-defense. Well, he kills _some
of them _in self-defense. The next thing he knows, the news is full
of breathless reports about an unidentified clown murdering some
up-and-coming employees of Wayne Enterprises, and the tension between
Gotham’s haves and its have-nots begins to boil over. The city needs
to be saved, but Bruce Wayne is still just a child. Someone else will
have to step up.

Not that Arthur has any interest in spearheading a cause. Put a
microphone in his face and he’ll yowl that he “doesn’t believe
in anything.” Yeah, he wants the world to look at itself in the
mirror — the way he has to every morning — but really he just
wants a hug, and for someone to tell him that he’s really there.
While “Joker” often plays like a beat-for-beat remake of “The
King of Comedy,” that movie was about a talentless man who was
convinced that he was special; this movie, by contrast, is about a
talented man who swallows the red pill and becomes convinced
that _nobody _is. That perspective allows Phillips to feign an
apolitical stance and speak to the people in our world who are
predisposed to think of Arthur as a role model: lonely, creatively
impotent white men who are drawn to hateful ideologies because of the
angry communities that foment around them.

It’s a confused and self-negating approach to a movie that sees
personal revenge as a viable spark for political revolution, and a
profoundly dangerous approach to a movie that’s too self-impressed
by its own subversiveness to see Arthur as anything but a hero.
Lawrence Sher’s gorgeous and grimy cinematography fawns all over
Joker, the swooning and weightless close-ups watching Phoenix do his
Twyla Tharp-like clown dance like he’s possessed by the holy spirit.
But Phillips’ direction abjectly fails to put us inside Arthur’s
head — to risk the more nuanced identification that would come from
a more subjective camera.

As “Joker” emerges from a turgid second act for an operatic grand
finale, the film grows drunk on its own unexpected grace. There are
moments of shocking violence, but mostly Philips is swept away by
Arthur’s newfound power. There’s a fundamental difference between
telling a story like this in the form of a dingy, misanthropic art
film like “Taxi Driver” and telling it in the universal language
of a superhero movie that’s going to open in multiplexes the world
over. In this context, that story can’t help but
feel _aspirational_. And Phillips is the first person to be seduced
by its pull — to be helplessly pulled along by an innate desire to
see Joker at the height of his power.

“Joker” is a movie about how fucked up people can exist in a
fucked up world — a movie that insists to the bitter end that one
does not negate the other. Arthur isn’t deranged _because _Gotham
is a garbage town, and Gotham isn’t a garbage
town _because_ people like Arthur are deranged. Rich or poor, bad
guys are the only ones who think like that. And yet, for decades on
end, Batman and the Joker have continued to invent each other because
we’re all stuck on an endless seesaw between heroes and villains,
order and chaos. As the news anchor puts it: The only answer for super
rats is super cats.

But Phillips, stuck between reinventing the superhero movie from the
ground up and throwing a cheap disguise on the same dumb origin story
we’ve already seen 1,000 times, needs his Joker to be both the light
and the dark, the yin and yang, the only sane man in a world gone mad.
He needs to have his cake, and to smear it all over his face in a big
red smile too. The result is an immaculately crafted piece of mass
entertainment that wants to be all things to all people, less a
Rorschach test than a cinematic equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat
that leaves us feeling like the movie, and the current state of studio
filmmaking itself, might actually be dead and alive at the same time.

By the time “The End” comes in its cute, old-timey font,
“Joker” is neither a game-changer nor just “another day in
Chuckletown.” It’s both. It’s good enough to be dangerous, and
bad enough to demand better. It’s going to turn the world upside
down and make us all hysterical in the process. For better or worse,
it’s exactly the movie the Joker would want.

_“JOKER” PREMIERED AT THE 2019 VENICE
[[link removed]] INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
WHERE IT WON BEST FILM.  WARNER BROS. WILL RELEASE “JOKER” IN
THEATERS ON OCTOBER 4._

_David Erlich is IndieWire's Senior Film Critic and Chief New York
Rangers Fan. He obviously lives in Brooklyn, and can pretty much
always be found on Twitter at @davidehrlich._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]