Following on from the awards success and critical acclaim of 2019’s psychological thriller Joker, director Todd Phillips is back with a second chapter on DC Comic’s iconic villain. Joker: Folie à Deux picks up the story two years on, with Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) incarcerated in Arkham Asylum and awaiting trial after his killing spree. At a therapy session, he meets troubled inmate Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) and the pair form a bond which is explored through fantastical jukebox musical interludes.
In the first outing to Todd Phillips’ version of Gotham City, his protagonist is presented as a misunderstood anti-hero, chewed up and spat out by a cruel society that ostracizes and neglects him. Stylistically, the film liberally borrowed from the early works of Martin Scorsese, the lead seen as a hybrid of sorts of the loner characters portrayed by Robert De Niro – this influence was further nodded to by De Niro’s brief part as the talk show host that mocks the protagonist and ultimately falls victim to him.
Rather than doubling down, this sequel surprisingly goes against the grain of its predecessor’s message. The explicit influences remain prevalent in the tone and aesthetic; the cinematography brings the same mudpuddle gloom to its prison hospital setting, and a chilling recurring melody in the score harks back to Taxi Driver once again. However, the script crucially turns the tables on how the main character is perceived, shifting the narrative from mentally ill to fraudulent narcissist, who also happens to be an insufferably bad singer. This is a pointed creative choice from Phillips given the much-publicised discourse around the previous film, and this juxtaposition against what came before makes for an interesting cinema experience.
Joaquin Phoenix had already cemented his status as one of the greatest screen actors working today, and even won an Academy Award for the role he’s reprising here. He’s a lot better in pretty much every other film he plies his trade in but his physicality as Fleck is something to behold, his awkward, skeletal frame adding to the broken performance. Gaga, on the other hand, feels misused as this interpretation of Harley Quinn, a character that’s been captured so brilliantly by Margot Robbie within the DCEU in recent years. The painful musical numbers waste her singing talent and are a test of audiences endurance, piling on unnecessary weight to a script that’s already bloated.
A peculiar sequel that’s main triumph comes from the fractured relationship with its own past, Joker: Folie à Deux is a flawed and yet fascinating follow-up.
Cinema Perspective 