From the looney (tunes) beginning, Joker: Folie à Deux lets us know that this isn’t your usual comic book movie. In the wake of Joker (2019), this sequel is all about the aftermath. And what a wake. Joker did over $1B in the global box office and won two Oscars, three BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, two Critics’ Choice Awards, and more. Those are big shoes, albeit clown shoes, to fill. Joker: Folie à Deux goes deeper, darker, and more disturbed, plus in a startling shift, it’s a musical.
In many ways, it’s a sequel in the classic fashion; For the most part, society returns in its role as the only villain able to make iconic comic-book arch-foe Joker sympathetic. A bone thin inmate of a Ryker’s Island-style Arkham Asylum, there’s nothing glorious about Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck. Instead there’s a body-horror in the character’s physicality that maintains that discomfort even when the character isn’t being actively brutalized by the prison industrial complex. The lead prison guard, Jackie Sullivan, is played by the charismatic yet menacing Brenden Gleason, the first in a lineup of great supporting actors. But this is not a Lovecraftian Arkham. It’s a hopeless and foul prison, set in cement grays and dinge.
Read the rest of the review at the button below — then come back here for some stray bits and observations that didn’t find a place in the piece.
I’m not the biggest fan of musicals. The ones I enjoy amount to…
Moulin Rouge
Rock & Rule
RRR
…and now, I guess, Joker: Folie à Deux. They’re may be another one I’m not recalling.
I’ll say that I ended up liking the sequel better than the first – anyone who read my review of the previous movie may have picked up on my disapproving tone. there are a couple of retcons that better justify the first movie as well; making me like that one a bit more.
Kudos to Phoenix for giving the audience two different characters (Arthur Fleck & Joker) who are unmistakable, even in silhouette and slow-motion silence. Joker does some Drunken style looking back bends and an occasional high-kick but is clearly more of a dancer while we could see Arthur Fleck’s primary Kung Fu is taking a beating.
Spoilers Below —
There’s a scene which features the death of a sympathetic coded-innocent inmate at the Arkham Asylum Correctional Facility. While the actual killing is off-screen (we’re focused on Fleck’s reaction) we do see the set-up before cutting away — one of the 3 prison guards wraps a wet towel around the inmate’s neck. We hear the struggle and the muttering of the guards afterwards: what’s conspicuously absent (or inaudible) is that inmate saying “I can’t breath.”
There’s a brief moment when I thought Joker would take on 3 prison guards in a KungFuMagazine style – taking on multiple assailants scene. It would have made writing the review all the more easier.
The movie remains set in an anachronistic mid-seventies.The police vehicles and fabric colors look very early 70’s New York to me (I was a kid there at that time). But answering machine technology wasn’t widely available until the 80’s.
Race continues to be a strange marker in these movies. After seeing the first one, I recall noticing how the exalted onscreen kills targeted white males but there was an implied off-screen violence directed at women of color; many of whom could be seen as seeking to help him (social workers, counselors & neighbors). Zazi Beats returns to testify during one of the movie’s courtroom scenes – I thought that character had been killed – so seeing her return was a swerve that seemed a bit apologetic.
It’s also notable that corrupt/abusive prison guards are all coded white. The few that are depicted with behavior that can be read as more professional are non-white. The same can be said for the competence of people working for the city – the people of color seem to know how to do their jobs. The white public defender is a caring woman but comes off as barely competent.
That public defender, Maryanne Stewart, is played by the fantastic Catherine Keener. It took me a moment to recognize that actor from her outstanding role as low-key villain of GET OUT (2017). I also confused her with the witch being play by the other Kathryn (Hahn) in Marvel’s latest Disney+ series Agatha All Along. I wondered if the casting was deliberate – Stewart playing an underling of the movie’s true villain — Society.
There is no after-credits sequence.
Warning: Spoiler for the ending below…
Maybe my favorite part: this duology ends with self-insert as a prequel to The Dark Knight (2008).