JokerMovie review: 'Joker is the ultimate Joaquin Phoenix role, which is not necessarily a compliment, though not a disparagement, either'
Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a.k.a. Joker. Photo: Warner Bros Editor’s Note: David Edelstein wrote his initial assessment of Joker at the Toronto Film Festival. This is his full review.
Although this is an “origin” story, Phoenix’s Arthur is a volatile party clown well before he adopts that fabled moniker. But oh, does he mean well. The problem is that from birth, the fates have cast him as a victim, more sinned against than sinning.
Joker is the ultimate Joaquin Phoenix role, which is not necessarily a compliment, though not a disparagement, either. He’s the best unhinged movie actor in the world. Phoenix never seems happier — or at least more at home — than when miserably lost in a character’s mind, his features registering every short-circuiting synapse.
As Time’s Stephanie Zacharek put it, the film is less an exploration of a modern pathology than a symptom of it. It’s an anthem for incels. It brings to mind Stephen Metcalf’s incisive 2012 essay in Slate after a disturbed man opened fire in a theater showing The Dark Knight Rises. Metcalf didn’t blame the movie, exactly. But he did trace a connection between civil massacres and characters like Joker.
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