‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ has a message for fans: Go f***k yourself

He’s been called the Clown Prince of Crime, a first-round contender for best Batman bad guy of all time, and a supervillain I.P. with the same amount of brand recognition as his Caper Crusader archnemesis. For most actors, he’s an excuse to go H.A.M. and/or to extremely ham it up. For Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips, the character was the chance to play around with decades of comic-book mythology and turn him into God’s Lonely Bozo — an amalgamation of antiheroes that carbon-date back to the Carter era. Regardless, the Joker was always an all-purpose agent of chaos. But what he really wanted to do was sing.

There’s a world in which Phillips and Phoenix deliver a sequel to their $1 billion-grossing, Oscar-winning, international-festival favourite Joker movie that’s simply a Xerox copy of the original, with more of Arthur Fleck — stand-up comic, true-crime celebrity, inadvertent cult leader — leading his minions in makeup down urban streets, wreaking havoc and watching the world burn. Thankfully, they haven’t done that, and decided upon tap-dancing down a road less traveled instead. There would be a sequel. That was inevitable. But instead of rehashing all the Scorsese cosplay and potential incel-baiting of the first film, the duo would continue this Fleck story via an MGM-style musical, with Phoenix and Lady Gaga (!) belting out standards and doing a little soft-shoe. Somewhere out there, the ghost of Arthur Freed was nodding his sage approval.

Say what you will about Joker: Folie à Deux, it’s a different, more tuneful beast than its predecessor. And you couldn’t call what they’re doing fan service, given that the general cut of its jib is that elevating and emulating disturbed, antisocial individuals just because they’ve tapped into inchoate rage is a bad idea. In fact, this sequel is whatever the exact opposite of fan service is — during its rare moments of clarity, you’d swear this was actually an indictment of those who flocked to Joker in the first place. Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Flip the bird to those who loved your “Nihilism, yippity-dee!” mojo the first time around, however, and you may find yourself standing alone against a mob. The closest thing it has to a message of any kind is: Hey, fanatics? Go fuck yourself.

Some things do remain the same: Philips is still clearly besotted with a vision of Gotham that’s part Fear City and part New Hollywood Redux fodder; Phoenix is still skeletal and bending over backwards, sometimes literally, in the name of hardcore commitment (as with the original Joker, his performance remains the best thing about this beware-of-false-idols parable); there are still just enough bits of Batman lore sprinkled throughout to remind you that, canon or not, this takes place in an intellectual-property universe. It’s why, two years after murdering a talk-show host on TV, sparking riots and inspiring a mass movement of bros in whiteface, Fleck is doing time at a prison that looks like Alcatraz but is really Arkham Asylum. And why the District Attorney played by Industry‘s Harry Lawtey, who wants to send Arthur to the electric chair for the five people he killed (six if you count his mother), is Harvey Dent.

As for Arthur, he’s practically catatonic, and instead of telling jokes, he’s the butt of one big cosmic one. After he was caught, they wrote books and made TV movies about his rampage. Fleck’s Q factor is at an all-time high, yet he’s locked away while his lawyer (Catherine Keener) tries to prove he’s got a multiple-personality disorder. A sadistic father-figure of a guard (Brendan Gleeson) offers Arthur the occasional kindness, yet always reminds him that what is giveth can be taketh away. Life is one long, medicated wait for oblivion. And then Fleck sees her.

She’s Lee Quinzel, and as every Batman expert, subversive-animation enthusiast and Margot Robbie followerwill tell you, she’s better known as Harley Quinn. When it was announced that Her Gaganess would be playing the beloved girlfriend-slash-psychosis-peer of Mr. J. in Folie à Deux, you could practically hear the slow clap echoing across the land; it’s the sort of brilliant conceptual idea that goes beyond stunt casting into the sublime. And from the moment of their initial meet-cute, after the two lock eyes across a crowded loony bin and Quinn mimes blowing her brains out, you can feel the promise of something electric on the horizon — a combination of the Method actor and the meat-suit chanteuse that might be more than sum of its kooky, hyper-talented parts.

Gaga would be seen as a key component of what Phillips wants to do with this sequel as well, in terms of integrating old-fashioned musical numbers into the psychodrama. And you’d think that those Dennis Potter-esque sequences, which pull from the American songbook and and play out the increasingly deranged fantasies of a couple crazy in love (and also, certifiably crazy), would be the highlights of this subverted superhero-adjacent tale. Yet with one notable exception — a burn-down-the-house version of Sammy Davis Jr.’s “Gonna Build a Mountain” — these scenes have the sort of black-hole energy that sucks the oxygen out of the proceedings. Both Phillips and the stars have gone on record as saying they wanted less polished, more raw takes on these standards, but the end results don’t give the you the escapist thrill nor the open emotional valves that such numbers usually offer, even when Phoenix is waltzing around a rec room and crooning his heart out on “For Once in My Life.” The whole conceit falls as flat as the often purposefully off-key singing. It’s like witnessing a musical put on by people who merely like the idea of musicals rather than the genre itself.

Which would be fine if that was the only problem with Folie à Deux, but the quality-control issues extend beyond just those throwback numbers. Quinn is obsessed with Arthur. More specifically, she’s obsessed with his Joker alter-ego, and is drawn to the idea of this charismatic figurehead leading the revolution that will tear down the system. He’s not embracing his inner supervillain, however, and given he’s on trial for murder, Quinn needs him to send in the clown ASAP to rile the crowds to action. Without giving away too much, Arthur finally does that, and the result drums up mayhem even he can’t control.

But it’s mayhem that the film can’t really handle or get a bead on either. And while the push-pull tension between acknowledging the allure of complete social breakdown and the remorse over unleashing the collective id is really what Folie à Deux seems to want to dig into, you never feel like it knows how to balance the two in a way that hits its targets. A handful of Gaga-centric moments stick out: a first kiss set against a flaming background, a silhouette shot against a full moon before a brief pas de deux; a smitten stroll away from a broken store window, where Quinn has just liberated a TV. Yet the movie doesn’t know what to do with the singer or her character either, and it’s hard not to fill like she’s one more ace in the hole that this sequel refuses to play. (That said, Gaga does what she can with what little screen time she’s got, and she continues to make a case for a side career as an actor; that’s-ah-spicy-meatball accent or not, we still stand by our effusive praise for her turn in House of Gucci 100-percent.)

“I don’t think we’re giving the people what they want,” Phoenix whines during a ’70s variety-show fantasia — a set piece that, as one of Deux‘s bigger missed-opportunities, doubles as its own commentary — and you want to applaud the fact that Phillips and company didn’t go the easy route here. They could have made a Bonnie and Clyde in smeared greasepaint, with the duo tearing up the town in tandem. They could have doubled down on the antisocial idol worship, rather than suggesting that maybe this very notion has put on the precipice of an IRL meltdown. They could have gifted us nothing more and nothing less than Joker 2: The Jokening, and stopped at merely giving the people what they want rather than gambling on something a little more challenging, a little less blatantly fan-friendly.

Though it does beg the question: Who, exactly, is Joker: Folie à Deux for? Completist Little Monsters? Warner Brothers Discovery board members? People who wish Singin’ in the Rain had 33-percent more insane clown posses? Having originally struck a chord with viewers who were easily down to psycho-clown with Phoenix’s scarily intense interpretation — who felt they had a Travis Bickle for their generation, and might have repeated the same mistakes those God’s lonely men from back in the day did — this new Joker now wants to wag its finger at them. But it’s also so alienating that it’s not likely to appeal to those crossover types who threw gold statues at the first one, either. This is the sequel’s real ha-ha-ha punchline. What do you get when you cross a discordant riff on a fan favorite with a failed prestige project? Twice as much deux-deux.

From Rolling Stone.