Joker: Folie À Deux is “a really bad musical,” raves Paul Schrader
Though his script for Taxi Driver inspired Joaquin Phoenix's first Oscar-winning jaunt around Gotham City, legendary writer-director Paul Schrader joined the masses displeased with Phoenix's latest turn in the makeup. In a lovely chat with Interview Magazine, which includes a beautiful moment where a man interrupts the interview to ask if the director could attend Yom Kippur services, Schrader admitted that he attempted about 35 of Joker: Folie À Deux's 7,374-minute runtime before giving up. For the record, there was a break in there.
"I saw about 10 or 15 minutes of it. I left, bought something, came back, saw another 10 minutes. That was enough," Schrader said. "It's a really bad musical."
It's certainly a surprise to hear Schrader's assessment, considering he didn't even get to the tap dancing sequence wherein director Todd Phillips forgot to film Phoenix's feet. Whether that was part of Phillips' overarching, anti-entertainment ethos, which stripped Joker of his amusing antics and deconstructed the comic book icon and the public's enduring fascination with him, is up to the viewer. But to Schrader, it's about liking the characters and actors (again, pretty rich coming from the guy who made Dog Eat Dog and whose many significant contributions to cinema include unlikeable characters writing in diaries). Nevertheless, likability is king.
"I don't like either of those people," Schrader said, making himself the enemy of Little Monsters everywhere. "I don't like them as actors. I don't like them as characters. I don't like the whole thing. I mean, those are people who, if they came to your house, you'd slip out the back door."
Again, we don't mean to beat a dead horse more than we already have (we live in a society that can't stop dunking on this movie), but which of Schrader's characters would you want to walk into your house? If we had to pick, ours would be William Tell from The Card Counter—nothing off about that guy.
A former film critic and author himself, Schrader has never been quiet about his distaste for mainstream Hollywood movies, particularly on Facebook, where he sometimes posts reviews while on Ambien. The interviewer even mentions when he asked his followers, "Will Dune III be made by AI? And if so, how can we tell?"
"I still have the critical impulse," Schrader said. "I used to be a critic. Occasionally, you need to scratch it. You see something, you have an idea about it, and you wish you could tell somebody. But I've got no need. I just put it out there. And you'll get some very interesting feedback, so that's really why I do it."
Still, hearing of Schrader's distaste for Folie À Deux is a little shocking. Heck, by the sounds of things, he didn't even get to the second time Arthur Fleck empties his chamberpot. At least Francis Ford Coppola liked it.