Arthur Fleck Flickers Out
The first Joker was the final “movie event” before the pandemic, and likely the last time a movie will affect public policy and the culture as a whole. Barbie and Oppenheimer were nostalgic movie events, not so much an attempt to recapture and rekindle the regular moviegoing audience as a new once-a-year remembrance of how things were in “the before times,” that awful pandemic-era cliché that, nearly five years on, sounds even dumber than it did back then. Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig filled theaters across the world in July 2023, but their entire rollout and release were predetermined. They were made to make money and win awards so that fewer people could make more money, and they succeeded; Joker did, too, but remember that director Todd Phillips insisted (however unconvincingly) that it would be a one-off, not a franchise. And then it made a billion dollars. Oi!
Joker: Folie à Deux cost $250 million, with $50 million each going to stars Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, and Phillips; it runs 138 minutes, mostly set in a prison and a courtroom. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, acclaimed at Venice and Toronto recently, runs 218 minutes with an overture and an intermission, and it cost $6 million. How? According to Corbet, Hollywood producers regularly steal from budgets, expensing $15,000 dinners without a thought; he also shot in Hungary, dramatically reducing labor costs. But could The Brutalist be made at its scale with an American union crew at $16 million? $20 million? I don’t see why not, then again I wouldn’t know—I’ve never spent $15,000 on dinner.
Phoenix has. I don’t even have to look that shit up. Lady Gaga? Come on. Phillips has been ultra-rich for most of this century, hitting his commercial stride with 2003’s Old School, striking gold with The Hangover in 2009, and 10 years later, bringing the final “movie event” into the world (Cats, released in December 2019, was certainly an event, but not on the level of Joker). Say what you will about the 2019 film—overlong and uneven—but I was pinned to my seat during that final sequence. You could cut the air in the theater that afternoon when Phoenix was building up to shoot Robert De Niro in the face. In the five years since its release, Joker has been referenced and meme’d to death, but that ending and my memory of that weekend somehow surmount everything peripheral.
This was a movie that had cops outside of Lincoln Center in New York, putting up barricades to stop… what? Who? Hordes of angry… who? Jokers? It’s so ridiculous now—can you imagine a movie even registering on that level with the general public anymore? Movies can still make money, as Gerwig and Nolan proved, but can they still be dangerous? Joker was just as much of a soulless corporate product as Barbie, but the panic and anxiety it caused is a testament to how much more movies mattered before the pandemic.
Joker: Folie à Deux bombed because it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and bombed there; in 2019, it won the Golden Lion. I haven’t watched it since—how could you without a crowd, and a nervous one at that? It was a bracing experience; the movie itself was flawed, too long (no need for the symphony scene), but that ending, it fried the audience. Joker: Folie à Deux is as steep a sequel drop as Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde, but worse still because Reese Witherspoon is far more interesting and enjoyable in character as Elle Woods than Phoenix as Arthur Fleck. He does nothing here, making the bloated first film feel rich in retrospect. This is how boring it is: there’s nothing to meme this time.
Maybe the ending, but not the ambiguous “prison rape” toward the end, which I read about on Twitter beforehand—had I not, I’m not sure I would’ve assumed Brendan Gleeson and his goons were running a train on Arthur Fleck. Then again, Phillips shoots the scene, like most of the movie, so carelessly and vaguely, that maybe he did mean to suggest Fleck getting raped by the guards, and merely failed in conveying it. Gleeson says something like “take his drawers off,” but he’s a bloody mess, and have any of these goons been openly lusting after the walking skeleton before now? Again, Phillips shoots it so vaguely that it can’t possibly work unless you’re looking for it.
The Joker sequel really did make me appreciate Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde a bit more, even if Witherspoon agrees it SUCKED next to the first one (it’s why she hasn’t done a sequel since). I’ve been wondering if critics tanked it at Venice out of spite for Phoenix leaving Todd Haynes in the lurch recently or their overvaluation of the first movie five years ago. Now I know they were telling the truth: there’s no reason to see Joker: Folie à Deux—except for the five minute Warner Brothers cartoon that opens the movie. You know I really enjoyed those five minutes.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith