There’s real force and feeling in this Joker and, at crucial moments, a raw vulnerability that’s genuinely upsetting to behold, writes JustinCChang
that set the haves against the have-nots. But in contrast with those other pictures, the class satire here feels calculating and opportunistic; even before Arthur is assaulted by some sleek-suited Wall Street types on the subway, his journey feels rigged for payback. When one of Arthur’s clown colleagues quietly slips a gun into his hands, you know it’s only a matter of time before he discovers his true calling as a homicidal performance artist.
And so Phoenix, though impossible as ever to look away from, never achieves the full force of revelation; his arresting performance suggests a familiar arsenal of scowls, howls, grins and grimaces snapping methodically into place. Which is not to say that the performance isn’t persuasive. There’s real force and feeling in this Joker and, at crucial moments, a raw vulnerability that’s genuinely upsetting to behold.
As bleak and beautiful as Phillips’ pop-realist vision of Gotham City may be, it’s also awfully overdetermined. This is a movie that wills itself to end in madness, not to express something true about human abjection or to reflect something resonant in the culture at large, but rather to fit the narrative template of a highly bankable intellectual property.
Or, as some have already theorized, between cinematic violence and the real thing. More than a few detractors — and here I mean not my critical brethren so much as those who have denounced the movie sight unseen — have already suggested that “Joker” is not merely a depiction of sociopathic evil, but a symptom and enabler of it. Their anxiety, theirwhen the possibility of real-world violence collides with the toxicity of fanboy culture, is easy enough to understand.
That narrative summary, of course, could also apply to “Taxi Driver,” a great movie that one man famously cited as his inspiration for attempted murder. I do not invoke Scorsese’s masterpiece to suggest that Phillips has made one himself.
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