Every Joker has a unique laugh that always echoes in your mind.
From Cesar Romero's ridiculous, cartoonish glee, to Jack Nicholson's creepy cackle, from Mark Hamill's devilish, sardonic laughter to Heath Ledger's manic, excited whoops of delight and derision, every cinematic version of Joker has brought his signature sense of dangerous, deranged humour to the screen and made an unmistakable impact, even to the point of parody. It is then only normal for us fanatics, who, despite our shared love for the Caped Crusader, have worshipped this unforgettable, irascible devil of the comics sinfully, to expect that the latest in this line-up, at least, knows his killing jokes and lethal punchlines.
Joaquin Phoenix, an assuredly overwhelming, almost fastidious performer who has cemented something of a reputation of playing both torment and delicious evil, is every bit a perfectly cast choice to play the arch-kingpin of crime and right within the first five minutes, the actor creeps into our skin and leaves us shaken and disturbed with his own signature laughter: a rattling, helpless, almost screechy fit of hoarse despair that his Arthur Fleck tries to explain, with a little card of apology, as a pathological condition.
And all this is before he is pushed over to the edge, before he is reborn as the dastardly super-villain that he is known to be.
As said, Phoenix is unquestionably brilliant as Fleck, a spindly, skinny and sad-eyed clown and aspiring stand-up comedian living a sordid existence with a mother still nursing hopes that her benefactor and employer, a proud and preening Thomas Wayne, will come to their rescue. Roughed up by street thugs, fired from his short-lived stint as a clown, Fleck rides the underground train back home one dark, dank evening and things turn suddenly violent. Soon, he is not only a reviled prime suspect for the upper crust snobs crying for his blood but also something of a rousing vigilante for Gotham's brutally marginalised masses.
We follow Fleck through this terse, almost dark and nightmarish descent into the depths of unhinged psychosis with a relentless atmosphere of mounting dread. Lensman Lawrence Sher's visuals are grimy but also dramatic and vivid in their grittiness, lending this film's Gotham City an unmistakably decadent urban texture of a dog-eared trade issue of the period of the film is set in, the banal 1980s and with its materialistic, money-grubbing mindset. Joker, however, achieves poetry truly when it gazes, longingly and almost tenderly, at Fleck's tormented eyes and gaunt, disjointed frame as he trudges on through the city's underlit streets, as he curls up in agony when beaten up and left on the ground and as he soon sways silkily, almost in effete grace as his mind swarms with the poison of nihilistic anger and loathing at the unimpressive world around him. For anybody who has always thirsted for a truly absorbing backstory of one of the most iconoclast pop culture villains of all time, this, the purely sensory experience of watching a tormented character plunge headfirst into off-the-wall anarchy, would suffice.
Unfortunately, one should not forget that Joker is also a full-fledged feature film, ponderously plodding on for more than 120 minutes, a fact that is not justified by how inadequate the film feels in comparison to the overwhelming performance trying to hold it in place. Director Todd Phillips, hitherto known for brash, physical comedies, tries his hand here at dramatic material valiantly but stumbles frequently on navigating what could have been a thickly plotted narrative to a well-rounded, coherent structure. The film suffers, quite often by doffing its hat relentlessly to not only far more well-plotted comic book storylines but also to better directed and written films and this is where I would like to talk about all those nudge-nudge, wink-wink references to that undisputed artist of urban decadence Martin Scorsese.
Several elements of the plot feel derivative; like Travis Bickle of the still-extraordinary and heart-rending Taxi Driver, Fleck is God's Lonely Man and also falls prey to the same psychopathic tendencies when he is thrust unwillingly with a gun to fend himself in the streets. And as if that was not enough, his hopes to be a guest on the wildly popular talk show hosted by his pompous comic idol Murray Franklin, played, in a rather awkward nod to The King Of Comedy, by Robert De Niro, the legend wasted here in a role that feels almost like a mockery of his own unforgettable portrayals Rupert Pupkin in that prescient film.
Still, cinematic larceny is the least of Joker's crimes. Phillips could have conjured up something ingenious and subversive with these broadly borrowed strokes, even something audacious, outrageous and suicidally brave. It never happens, even as the film flirts with some intriguing ideas, like in the scene when Fleck is pitted against Wayne, who is not any idealistic Charles Palantine but rather our very own Donald Trump in his pompous arrogance and the stage is set for a very incendiary confrontation, complete with a nod at Modern Times, itself one of the greatest satires about a little man taking on a big capitalist world but it ends in a whimper of miserable agony and things only go downhill from then onwards. And the less said about a shoehorned metaphysical moment, the better, really.
Similarly, there is nothing to be made of Zazie Beetz, cast rather lazily here as the warm and affable neighbour Sophie, whose cruelly brief narrative arc as Fleck's unlikely love interest can be construed as yet another failed attempt to match up to the afore-mentioned films. Those films were much more perceptive and subtle in their approach, using the conceit of unwittingly unreciprocated romance or casual social rejection as a trigger for the onset of the anarchy inside the battered soul of the protagonist; in Joker, she is merely for decorative value, a flimsy piece of flourish that is merely there to make the increasingly dire proceedings lighter.
There is, however, still not much room for hope and while it is understandable that the film vies for a morbid intensity fitting to the character in question, there is also, subsequently, little room for any wicked wit or particularly subversive intelligence here as well. As origin stories of the arch-kingpin of crime go, Joker really tries hard and in vain to pull off the coup of being as hauntingly atmospheric as the groundbreaking The Killing Joke, with the great Alan Moore's nihilistic, noir storytelling and Brian Bolland's still eerie, nightmarish illustrations, which ironically did a flawlessly neat job of building up, scene by scene, the Joker's devastating moment of catharsis while sculpting, parallel to it, a lean and mean comic book story of insanity and vengeance.
Yes, it is superbly shot, has a suitably melancholy soundtrack and Phoenix is really worth the money as he always is but is this what we, worshippers of the man who never tells the same story about how he got those scars, deserve? To quote a more memorably wicked voice of evil, it's not quite showtime.
My Rating: 3 Stars Out Of 5
