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The most interesting parts of Joker are inevitably going to be drowned out in shout matches about the least interesting parts of Joker.

Before the film was released, it seemed to have a totemic power. Critics (especially American critics) seemed tied up in how “dangerous” this cinematic origin story of a killer clown could be. Entertainment Weekly refused to assign the film a simple letter grade. Vulture ruminated on whether mainstream audiences were ready for a film that combined the moral ambiguity and grit of seventies cinema with the trappings of superhero blockbusters. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and director Todd Phillips did his bit to stir the pot by complaining about the “far left” or “woke” culture.

All of which seems to combine to suggest that Joker is a film of the moment, to imbue the live action R-rated autumnal release about Batman’s arch enemy with a powerful cultural resonance. Joker seemed to exist as a Rorschach test, even before anybody arguing about it had actually watched a full scene of footage from it. Listening to the chatter, reading the churn of the internet, it seemed like Joker had to mean something. Even if the film refused to provide a simple meaning, that meaning would be imposed on it. Joker was to be the best and worst of the current moment. It was to be a film that spoke to the “now.”

As such, it is almost a relief how stridently Joker refuses to actually say anything particularly insightful, and to trollishly chide the conversation around it for trying to force meaning upon it. In one of the film’s most absurdly on-the-nose moments, the camera passes over a demonstration outside a city opera house as protestors wave signs in the air. “We’re all clowns,” the sign proclaims. Amid the cacophony around it, how right Joker is.

There is something at once frustrating and endearing about the way in which Joker engages with what might broadly be termed “issues”, the ways in which the film interacts with the sense that it might have something to say about the current highly-charged political moment in the same way as now-controversial films like The Matrix or Fight Club. Those films resonated with an entire generation, and their legacies have been complicated by cooption by bad actors. Provocative films lend themselves to misinterpretation. More than that, provocative films lend themselves to potentially valid but troubling interpretation.

Joker has the look and feel of a provocative movie. Even before the film was released, it was being chided on both the political left and the political right. To the left, it was an “incel” origin story. To the right, it was a celebration of the “antifa” movement. Joker understands that it’s playing with fire. However, the film is incredibly (and cynically) calculated to avoid making any gesture that might be perceived to cross a line. Late in the movie, supporting characters attempt to grill the protagonist on his politics. “I’m not political,” he states repeatedly. Not only does the movie believe this, it is designed to support it.

By its nature, Joker is designed to be a visceral and unpleasant movie. It is the story of a man descending into madness, somebody who feels alienated and dejected who just wants to make himself heard. Repeatedly over the course of the film, Joker focuses on the joke diary that Arthur Fleck keeps for himself. It focuses on one particular joke – “I hope my death makes more cents than my life.” However, the most revealing details is in the line directly above that. “I want to be seen,” Arthur writes. That is the driving arc of the film around him. Arthur Fleck wants to be special. He wants his life to be celebrated.

“You never listen,” Arthur complains to his social worker at one point. “Through my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do.” He adds, “People are started to notice.” This desperation to be acknowledged bleeds through even in nominally happier sequences. Performing his stand-up routine, Arthur tries to narrativise his own life. “People always laughed when I told them I wanted to be a comedian,” he states on stage. “But no one’s laughing now.” The film doesn’t leave unsaid the irony of a comedian celebrating the lack of laughter, underscoring it by having another character deadpan, “You can say that again.”

The idea that Joker would focus on a young and angry white man seeking validation and celebration was a cause for concern, especially in these heated times. After all, the past few years have seen a massive increase in public acts of violence from young and angry white men seeking validation. They don’t keep joke diaries like Arthur, but they do publish manifestos and videos. This young male frustration is often tied to issues around race and sex, to white supremacy or simple misogyny. The idea that Joker might ask its audience to sympathise with such a character was a source of outrage.

This is where Joker feels incredibly cynical and calculated. Writers Todd Phillips and Scott Silver know that they are playing with fire, and have a surprisingly adept understanding of where the fault lines lie. At one point in Joker, the character attends a screening of the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times. Broadly speaking, it’s intended to resonate with the film’s themes of ordinary people being crushed beneath the heel of an uncaring society. However, the most evocative part of that sequence is the footage of Charlie Chaplin skating on the edge of a balcony, looking like he might fall into the abyss at any moment.

Joker draws very heavily from seventies cinema, especially the films of Martin Scorsese. Those films dealt with issues of gender and race in genuinely complicated ways, that have been explored and discussed. They weren’t always elegant, but they were certainly effective. Travis Bickle, for example, was in many ways a progenitor of the modern alt-right movement. If these films were released today, there would be outrage. The discourse would be deafening. Film criticism would spiral into a series of self-defeating arguments about the gulf between depiction and endorsement.

Joker very cannily side steps all of this. It alludes to these ideas, but never follows through. Joker repeatedly suggests that a large part of Arthur’s frustrations are sexual in nature. He repeatedly centres himself through dance, which serves as an obvious sublimation of sexual desire. (The only other person with which Arthur dances is his mother, whom he also bathes.) During one of these dance sequences, Arthur prematurely discharges a firearm. A large part of his character arc is devoted to his fixation on a beautiful single mother in his apartment building, who he follows around. He hopes to strike up a relationship with her.

Later in the film, Arthur lands a slot on a high-profile late-night chat show. He is following a sex therapist named “Doctor Sally.” When host Murray Franklin suggests that she might be able to help the young man, she inquires, “Does he have a sexual problem?” Here, the film punts. “He has lots of problems,” Murray jokes. Joker works hard in its last act to defuse any real hint of misogyny. Sophie Dumond, the object of Arthur’s affections, never becomes a focus of murderous rage. Although Arthur does kill one female character, the film is careful to avoid taking the same pleasure it does in punishing male characters.

The same is true of the film’s handling of race. Joker is careful to ensure that its protagonist is always punching up. One of the film’s inciting incidents is an attack on a subway that leaves three people dead. Given the film’s eighties backdrop and gritty New York vibes, Bernie Goetz is an obvious point of inspiration. However, Goetz shot four unarmed black teenagers. The racial politics of that shooting were inescapable. Joker avoid any potentially problematic subtext by making the victims three investment-banker types, erasing the racial subtext and making the act itself much more sympathetic.

Arthur is never directly motivated by any of the facts that tend to motivate these sorts of killers in real life. Indeed, even as the system repeatedly fails Arthur, Joker is very careful to illustrate that people of colour are the ones most sympathetic to his breakdown. Zazie Beetz plays Sophie Dumond, the neighbour that Arthur connects with and who treats him with a surprising amount of tenderness. Brian Tyree Henry plays a clerk at Arkham, who tries to protect Arthur from some uncomfortable truths and advises him to seek help. Sharon Washington plays Arthur’s social worker, April Grace plays an Arkham psychiatrist.

Late in the film, after enacting a particularly brutal and visceral attack upon an old bully, Arthur pauses to consider the scene. A little person cowers in the corner of the room, shocked at the horror that he has just witnessed. In that moment, Joker draws a very clear line in terms of the violence that it is depicting. The film decides that having Arthur murder a little person on camera would just be too much, and would tip the movie’s delicate balance over the edge. “I’d never hurt you,” Arthur coos. “You were the only one who was ever nice to me.” In its own weird way, even sinking into depravity, Arthur is an ally.

After all, Joker is very careful to offer a broader context for Arthur’s degeneration. His inevitable collapse into madness is painted as – at least in part – a function of a failing society. Joker underscores the the support structures that Arthur needs to manage his mental health are being stripped away as a result of tax cuts that help the wealthiest citizens of Gotham. The film even offers a broad narrative of class warfare. “Kill the rich?” asks one newspaper headline. “A new movement?”

The film paints Arthur as the avatar of a civil uprising akin to that of The Dark Knight Rises, albeit much less developed. The film’s clown mask becomes analogous to the Guy Fawkes masks popularised by V for Vendetta or the F-Society masks from Mr. Robot. The film never really engages substantively on this point, and takes care to avoid embroiling Arthur too directly with these protests or campaigns. On the night of the biggest protest, a colleague assumes that Arthur has donned his clown make-up to attend. Arthur has no real interest in the movement beyond celebrity. He is appearing on a talk show instead.

Joker is deliberately vague in its approach to Arthur. Despite giving the character a name and history, Joker remains surprisingly faithful to the core principle of the character that Alan Moore suggested in The Killing Joke. The character’s origin is intentionally obscured and vague, growing murkier and murkier over the runtime of the film. Joker avoids trying to tie down too many specifics. Repeatedly over the course of the film, Arthur breaks out in laughter at inappropriate moments. He explains this by handing a card which says, “I have a condition.” The condition is never specified. Those details are left deliberately vague.

Again, all of this feels very calculated. Joker is playing with big ideas, but not necessarily engaging with them. As much as the film has a central cohesive philosophy, it is ironic nihilism – a sense that nothing truly matters, and that Arthur’s world is just chaos. Characters repeatedly challenge Arthur, “Why would you do that?” He can rarely answer. To a certain extent, this works. After all, the whole point of the Joker as a character is empty nihilism. More to the point, there’s a sense in which this shallow irony is perhaps as close as the film comes to making a grim comment on the modern world.

However, there is also something very cynical in all of this, a sense that various narrative and characterisation choices in Joker seems designed to look provocative without actually being provocative. Joker is nowhere near the ticking time bomb that films like The Matrix or Fight Club were, and is somewhat lesser for that fact. Joker is fascinated by the violence of men like Arthur, but seems to realise that actually looking at the factors driving that violence head-on would be too much for blockbuster like this. More than that, it would make the discourse around the film even more toxic.

Joker is very conscious about its provocations. It even seems gleeful. At the climax of the film, characters within the movie actually debate whether the character should really be appearing in mass media at such a volatile time. “You can’t send him out like that,” producer Gene Ufland chides Murray Franklin when Arthur shows up in full clown make-up. The audience would react viscerally and violently. Murray spends a not-insignificant chunk of the third act trying to read political context into Arthur’s actions, and Arthur repeatedly dismisses his concerns. “You shouldn’t joke about that,” Doctor Sally chides Arthur at one point.

There is something be turns exhilarating and exhausting about the way in which Joker essentially trolls its own critics. In one sense, it is an act of calculated cowardice; the film avoids saying too much of anything itself, and so leaves it up to the audience to impose meaning upon it, only to chide them for the conclusions that they might reach. Joker attempts to channel the tone and mood of genuinely transgressive texts, but lacks the sort of courage and appetite that made them so transgressive in the first place. Joker feels like a teenager rooting through its parents’ wardrobe, trying costumes on for size.

At the same time, there’s something alluring in the irreverence that runs through Joker. It is too much to say that Joker shrewdly turns the joke on its own hyperbolic critics and openly mocks the moral panic around it, but there is an element of truth to that. Joker knows exactly what buttons to press to get a reaction, but also knows how far it can go before crossing a line. This is perhaps the way in which Joker feels most contemporary and most modern. It has a strong understanding of its own cultural context, and plays within that. In its own weird way, that makes it a fitting tribute to the character.

(There is also an even more cynical reason for relief. It seems fair to wonder whether a director like Todd Phillips might be able to handle that sort of genuine transgressiveness with the delicacy and skill required, without the whole film collapsing into itself. This is not a criticism of Phillips per se. There are very few directors who can compete with those that Phillips so consciously invokes; Scorsese, Friedkin, Coppola. Given how Phillips has reacted in press around the film, it might be for the best that Joker draws the lines that it does.)

Indeed, it’s notable that the only real transgression in Joker is on the soundtrack. One late-film sequence that has already been gif-ed and shared and trailered features the character in full clown make-up, dancing down a set of concrete stairs to the tune of Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2. It is a cracking tune. However, it is also the work of a convicted pedophile. There are any number of ways to score that sequence, as Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated. That particular choice feels very crass and calculated. Just outrageous enough to attract some pushback, but not enough to risk a full blown explosion.

Still, the amount of oxygen that this debate has taken up is a little frustrating. The more interesting parts of Joker have little to do with how closely (or not) the film’s depiction of Thomas Wayne may or may not resemble Donald Trump. (He was originally meant to be played by Alec Baldwin before Brett Cullin stepped into the role.) Indeed, Joker is a stunningly lavish production, which is beautifully shot and wonderfully constructed. Phillips has constructed Joker as a love letter to the New Hollywood movement of the seventies, and that shines through.

Joker unfolds against the backdrop of the popular memory of a long-lost New York City. The film nominally unfolds in Gotham, but – as usual – Gotham is a stylised invocation of New York City. (The three investment bankers are repeatedly identified as “Wall Street Guys.”) Phillips’ Gotham is just as heightened as that created by Tim Burton or Bruce Timm, just drawing from a different set of influences. Denny O’Neil famously described Gotham as “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November.” Phillips has taken that idea to heart, pinpointing that November to a specific year.

Late in the movie, a billboard at a cinema cites Blow Out and Zorro: The Gay Blade. A trash strike serves as both a thematic beat and a source of atmosphere. These touches squarely placing the action in 1981. This was New York’s infamous “most violent year”, and that is the context in which Arthur’s simmering anger and rage exist. Phillips skillfully captures the mood and the sense of place. Apocalyptic dread hangs in the air. There is a sense that kindling has been massing for a long time and all that is needed is a spark. That said, Joker never feels particularly real. Arthur isn’t moving through 1981, so much as the memory of it.

Joker wears its influences on its sleeve. As in Taxi Driver, the film takes great pleasure in having characters mime suicide. The film casts Robert DeNiro as a seasoned comedy host who is worshipped by a younger fan with a tenuous grip on reality, reversing the dynamic from King of Comedy. The film’s second big subway action sequence plays an homage to The French Connection. Even those now-familiar shots of the Joker dancing down those long concrete stairs seem to deliberately invoke The Exorcist. (For his part, Phillips also cites Chantal Akerman as an influence.)

There is a solid argument to be made that Joker should be best approached as a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix. As Arthur Fleck, the actor is mesmerising and unsettling. Recalling the work of actors like DeNiro in the seventies, there is something unsettling and uncanny about the failed stand-up comedian. Phoenix walks a fine line between creepy intensity and awkward vulnerability. The audience understands him and feels sympathy towards him, but is also repulsed by him. It is an impressive performance, and it anchors the film together. (Joker has an impressive ensemble, but they all drift into and out of Fleck’s orbit.)

Joker is worth seeing on as big a screen as possible. Lawrence Sher’s cinematography is rich and vivid, full of deep colours and strong textures. Phillips has an eye for some beautiful shots, and the world of the film lends itself to a variety of striking compositions. In some ways, Joker works best as a heightened fever dream, a collection of images thrown together; Arthur running through streets overflowing with garbage, a makeup brush tracing paint across a tired and weary face, the man known as “Joker” dancing behind the curtains of a late night talk show, a man waiting just off stage smoking a cigarette.

Similarly, Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score taps into the sense of dread at the heart of Joker. The obvious influence here is – as one might expect – Bernard Herrman’s memorable score to Taxi Driver. However, Guðnadóttir adds a rumbling bass that taps into something more elemental and primal. Joker is a much uneasier watch than its content would actually suggest, and the soundtrack is a large part of that. Putting aside the thornier issues of cultural context or the more interesting questions of genre, Joker is simply a triumph of old-fashioned film-making.

Indeed, perhaps the most subversive aspect of Joker is the way in which Phillips seems to have convinced the modern studio system to produce a decidedly old-fashioned urban thriller by cloaking it in the trappings of a superhero blockbuster. Indeed, box office projections for opening weekend are incredibly strong for what is effectively a period piece character study of a man having an extended nervous breakdown. There is something very cheeky in that, a slight sense that Joker is gaming the cultural ubiquity of the superhero genre to do what it wants to do.

Phillips has constructed an extended homage Martin Scorsese, who served as a producer on the film. Indeed, Joker would make an interesting double feature with the season’s other big Scorsese homage, Hustlers. More than that, Joker and Hustlers all feel like a prelude to the winter’s later release of The Irishman. There is a sense of watching other film-makers grapple with the legacy and influence of one of the great American directors before watching Scorsese grapple with his own.

However, nostalgia can be a trap. It rarely works as an end of itself. There is pleasure in watching these sorts of homages, but they can occasionally feel a little empty and abstract, loving but lifeless. This is one of the bigger issues with Hereditary and Midsommar, both extended and affectionate love letters to seventies horror constructed with a great deal of craft. Joker would be satisfying if it existed as nothing more than an extended homage to seventies cinema, but it would also feel empty.

This gets at the stuff that is actually interesting and engaging about Joker, buried beneath the controversy and the outrage. The production team have awkwardly and embarrassingly tried to distance Joker from the wider superhero genre; Phillips stated that the creative team were “not even doing Joker”, while Marc Maron has distanced the film from the genre by stating that “it’s not that kind of movie.” However, the most interesting aspect of Joker is the way in which the film draws a clear connecting line between the vigilante cinema of the seventies and eighties and the modern superhero blockbuster.

Joker is a superhero movie through and through. As much as Phillips’ interviews might try to put some distance between it and the genre, the connections linger. At one point, a young Bruce Wayne slides down a pole evoking Batman ’66. At the climax of the film, a camera pushes in close on a police license plat 9189, a slightly mangled invocation of Tim Burton’s Batman film. The movie even draws heavily from the comics, despite Phillips’ protestations. Frank Miller is a major influence here, most notably in a third act sequence on a late night talk show that owes a lot to The Dark Knight Returns.

As such, Arthur exists halfway on a spectrum between Dirty Harry and The Dark Knight, which creates a palpable tension. Critic Scott Mendelson likened the film to “a feature-length, R-rated episode of Batman: The Animated Series.” Mendelson is alluding those episodes of the series – like Heart of Ice or Mad as a Hatter or If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? – that would focus on the Dark Knight’s villains, turning them into warped and tragic figures. There is certainly an element of that within Joker. When Arthur confronts the man who might be his father, the man asks what Arthur wants. “Some warmth,” he replies. “A hug?”

However, in terms of cinematic storytelling, Joker is very plainly a warped superhero origin story. Like Batman Begins, it is a story about a person transforming from an individual into a symbol. As with so many superhero origins, it dwells up the death of a parent figure; while Bruce Wayne lost his father and Peter Parker lost his uncle, Arthur ruminates upon the fact that he never had a father. So many characters in the film are positioned as surrogate fathers to Arthur, from the talk show host Murray Franklin to the billionaire Thomas Wayne. Joker repeatedly stresses that Arthur is projecting this on to them.

Indeed, as much as Phoenix’s massive weight loss for the part is recognisable as one of the conventions of modern prestige acting, it also feels like an inversion of the sort of body transformation that actors like Chris Pratt or Chris Evans go through to star in comic book movies. Whereas those superhero movies present a hypermasculine ideal, Joker lets it curdle into grotesquery. Joker is not especially subtle about this. Superhero movies are traditionally about elevation, while Joker makes itself a story about descent. Arthur awkwardly trundles up steps to humiliation after humiliation, but is only truly free on the way down.

As a result, Joker feels like it is playing with the conventions and expectations of superheroism. One of the great paradoxes of the modern superhero film is the extent to which so many cinematic superheroes aren’t especially heroic; Spider-Man: Far From Home argues that its teenage protagonist should be allowed access to extra-judicial murderous drones, while the characters in Avengers: Endgame never give any thought to the myriad realities that they are endangering in an effort to resurrect their own friends and loved ones.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Films like Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse engage with the idea of superheroism as a concept, becoming empowerment fantasies as much as power fantasies. Some of these films, like Black Panther or Iron Man 3, attempt to meaningfully grapple with the subtext of these sorts of stories. However, a lot of modern superhero films are decidedly vacuous; they are stories about people who have tremendous power and who use that power to manifest their will upon the world.

Joker is unsettling because it lays a lot of that emptiness and cynicism out in the open, by applying a lot of tropes and conventions of the modern superhero story bare. Joker draws a straight line between the fantasy of vigilante violence that motivated so much of the gritty urban thrillers of the seventies and eighties and the more sanitised and sterile superhero stories that play with the same power fantasies. It is too much to suggest that Joker asks what a superhero origin story for Travis Bickle might look like, but instead suggests that maybe modern superhero films aren’t that far removed from Bickle.

This clash of genre and tone makes sense. Todd Phillips attempted something similar with The Hangover, Part III. However, Joker works a lot better than The Hangover, Part III. There were a lot of problems with The Hangover, Part III; it wasn’t funny enough, it was overly familiar, there was no real energy to it. However, there was nothing especially interesting in Phillips’ attempts to fuse a crime epic to a bawdy comedy. Joker works better because there is something interesting in fusing a seventies urban thriller with a superhero blockbuster, even beyond the obvious contrast between Hollywood fifty years ago and today.

Joker is a fascinating piece of work, and superbly well-made film. The biggest issue with the film is that it occasionally feels a little too glib and calculated in trying to shrug off any potential reading of it. There are times when Joker feels like watching an exceptionally talented teenager push buttons to get a reaction, but being careful never to do anything too dangerous or too outrageous. This is by turns frustrating and compelling, depending on whether one chooses to see “the joke’s on you” as a too-smug dismissal or a much-deserved burn.

Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Joaquin Phoenix, joker, Movie, non-review review, review, Todd Phillips |