Joker: a cinematic wild card

Superhero movies are a bit like trains these days. Miss one? Wait a few minutes and there’ll be another. As a genre, the vein has been richly mined.

Much of have been fairly family friendly. A few have gone off in a different direction. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen were darker and grittier. And certainly more violent.

The Joker stands alone in terms of darkness, reality and violence. It’s R rated, and deservedly so, and that alone may stand out as a stop sign for many viewers. If so, good day to you. Perfectly understandable.

But for some, it’s a story they want to be told. So let’s get to the story.

“Joker” probably assumes most audiences are at least basically aware of its protagonist.  The Joker is a well-known adversary of Batman, and debuted in comic books in 1940. He has been portrayed by many actors over the years… starting with Cesar Romano’s over-cooked humorous portrayal in the old 60s TV series… through to Jack Nicholson, Jared Leto, Mark Hammill (in cartoons and voiceover) and Heath Ledger.

Ledger’s performance in particular brought the character to greater prominence, ensuring the self-proclaimed crown prince of crime was no longer seen as a joke. Ledger won a posthumous Academy Award for his portrayal and that performance is widely regarded as his best performance and one of the most nuanced and distinctive performances of a generation.

So Joaquin Phoenix is stepping into some pretty large oversized clown shoes in this performance, BUT… he fills them. And then some.

This story provides a brand-new back story for the Joker. That in itself shouldn’t even offend DC Comics fanboys because the Joker himself has provided so many conflicting back stories that contradiction is the one constant.

In this story, he is a poor part-time clown called Arthur Fleck, barely getting by on his meagre income and looking after his aged and largely immobile mother. He has a mental illness and a neurological disability which causes him to laugh at inappropriate moments, even when he is upset or scared. And (this next sentence is a little spoilery so skip it if you want) the cause of that disability is particularly upsetting.

Arthur is a simple man in a complex world. He wants to make people happy, wants to make people laugh, and his simplicity and openness leads to him being routinely taken advantage of and bashed. Often severely so. Simultaneously, the local government ceases supplying the medication he needs for his illness.

It’s the what-comes-next… ALL the stuff that comes next… that has divided reactions.

After a series of humiliations, Arthur goes down a path of violent revenge. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to give that much away given he is on the way to becoming one of the best known villains in fiction. It’s how that is handled, the violence, and the message it sends that that has polarised viewers.

There’s no escaping it… this film is violent. Deliberately, viscerally, uncomfortably violent. And the moments of violence, even though you suspect they’re coming, are still very disturbing when they come.

But the actual acts of violence, though dramatic and always seemingly lurking not far away, are NOT pervasive. This is not like a John Wick or Die Hard film where five minutes doesn’t go by without another handful of murders… where the death count is so high you become immune and where you are encouraged to support violence by good guys as long as it’s directed against really bad people.

In Joker, the path to violence, at least the violence by the central character (who suffers plenty of it along the way) takes quite a while to get to….building to a crescendo… several crescendos. And it feels REAL. Even in a fictionalized universe such as this, it’s an all-too-real analog to some of the darker aspects of our own non-fictional world.

Much of the early portrayal of Arthur is deliberately designed to make him a sympathetic character and THAT seems to be the concern of many critics (the official critics as well as the average punters who threw down their hard earned dollars to see the film). In making Arthur/The Joker sympathetic, doesn’t that condone his violence? Doesn’t that condone his revenge?

In a word, no. Not for me anyway, and I think that’s the crux of the issue here. Reactions are based on the eyes of the beholder with this film.

In my opinion, the writer and director did a very good job of making the Joker’s violence SO outrageous, so unacceptable that he ceases to be a sympathetic character. It certainly seemed to me that the film-makers weren’t trying to incite or justify either violence or revenge… just to retell a well-known story showing the descent of a good man, and how a really bad man got to that stage.

To use a different example, if you were to take one of the world’s most prolific serial killers and tell their back story, no doubt there are points in their childhood or even later where their story may be sympathetic. Would it make you support where their journey finished up? No way.

But it does show a lot of violence, and that includes a lot of gun violence. Some argue that the very showing of that will offer a license to some, or has a detrimental effect. I lack the expertise to answer that.

What I can say is that this is a masterfully crafted film, filled with clever directorial choices, engrossing cinematography and sublime acting. One key motif to watch for is the repetition of the huge set of stairs that Arthur climbs several times… heading up them lethargically and unenthusiastically like Sisyphus to his never changing drudgery. And then towards the end, when he walks down those stairs… lightly, dancingly, as the Joker. Well told without a word.

Overlooked to some extent, because of the debate over violence, is how the film devastatingly shows the plight and the despair of the poor, the mentally ill and the disabled in an often uncaring world.

And the work of Joaquin Phoenix is an incandescent, committed demonstration of his craft. In the real world, Phoenix comes off as a bit uncomfortable, socially awkward and sometimes even antagonistic in interviews. But in this film, in the environment he actually wants to inhabit, he unleashes his complete toolbox of acting skills. His Joker shows more vulnerability than any previous renditions, but still manages to emit chilling menace with ease. Such was his commitment that he lost 25 kilos for the role. It’s a mesmerizing tour de force.

But should you watch it? Dealer’s choice. It doesn’t feature someone overcoming insurmountable odds to accomplish a personal triumph. You won’t be uplifted. You probably won’t feel better at all. You may even be left feeling a little crook and upset. But it’s a masterclass in screenwriting, acting and directing and shows a real world, real suffering, real despair and real disenchantment. You need to decide if it’s for you.

It WAS for me. I gave it 10/10.

Chris Gordon

Chris Gordon is a former journalist and editor, trying his hand in creative writing. The writer of a musical and two musical revues, he is currently working on a number of other projects.