★★
Move over Suckerpunch, this Phoenix/Gaga jukebox tragedy is now the worst asylum musical in Hollywood history.
The original Joker earned over $1 billion at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. So it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a sequel. What wasn’t inevitable was that the sequel would be so appallingly, brain-meltingly dull.
Joaquin Phoenix reprises his role as Arthur Fleck, aka Joker, now incarcerated in Arkham State Penitentiary for the crimes of killing five people. When the film begins, Arthur is heavily medicated and disconnected, a far cry from the Joker persona that surfaced in the first film. Phoenix lost a lot of weight for the role – despite Philips emphasizing that Fleck’s psychiatric medications would be more likely to cause him to add weight. I suppose that’s the power of stardom, through, if you want to shed a bunch of pounds not even the director can stop you.
Lady Gaga joins the cast as Lee Quinzel, a character inspired by fan favourite Harleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn (here a fellow patient and melancholy arsonist, not a madcap ex-psychiatrist as Harley is usually depicted). A Folie À Deux is a shared madness, a mutual dysfunctional enablement, and it is this that underpins the bond – is it true love? – between Arthur and Lee.
The title also nods towards Arthur’s internal struggle between his two identities. Are Fleck and Joker really one and the same? Is he a man divided, or just hiding in plain sight? Which persona can win Lee’s heart?
Folie À Deux also brings back familiar faces from the first Joker film; Zazie Beetz briefly returns as neighbour Sophie Dumond, and other supporting characters from the original movie make cameo appearances. Brendan Gleeson joins as Jackie Sullivan, a prison guard at Arkham, and Steve Coogan plays hard-bitten newsman Paddy Meyers. He’s genuinely good in his one scene, interviewing Fleck on TV.
Things start promisingly with a WB cartoon introduction that shows the events of the first movie as having been perpetrated by Fleck’s literal shadow. This nod towards Jungian archetypes and ideas of disintegration is one of the few interesting choices in the film, though it doesn’t explore the idea, or any other idea, particularly deeply.
As the film grinds on, Fleck prepares for and then participates in his murder trial – with the action largely taking place either at Arkham or in the courtroom. Fleck must decide whether to throw his lot in with his defence attorney Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), or his paramour Lee. The former gives sober advice on how to put forward an insanity plea, while the latter temptingly promises that crowds of supporters are gathering for him outside, and that together they can “build a mountain.”
In her favour, Lee has one thing that Stewart does not – the ability to seduce Fleck into joining her in her musical fantasies, which are realised as Hollywood extravaganzas and tacky TV specials. In the first film, Fleck’s connection to music was present in moments like his big dance down the Shakespeare Steps, in the Bronx. With Lee’s encouragement, music now becomes dominant, with the star-crossed couple expressing their melancholy and euphoria through song and dance fantasies with classic American showtunes – including Get Happy, Close To You, and most emphatically That’s Entertainment from Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 hit The Band Wagon: “The clown with his pants falling down / Or the scene that’s a dream of romance / Or the scene where the villain is mean / That’s Entertainment!”
These performances are meant to feel organic, blending into the world of Arkham and the unstable minds of its characters, and representing the mental and emotional shifts Arthur experiences as he becomes more entwined with Lee and his Joker persona.
Given that the power of the Hollywood musical plays such a significant role in Folie À Deux, it’s a wonder that those scenes aren’t better than they are. The staging is bland, the choreography dull. Phoenix can’t sing, which in another film might have been claimed as an aesthetic choice – but when he’s paired with professional songbook-belter Lady Gaga, and surrounded by rich production values, it just doesn’t work.
Lady Gaga also worked as a music consultant on the film, and I wonder if at any point she consulted with her lawyers as to how to get out of it. In her defence she manages to make Lee much more slippery and interesting than Fleck, particularly in the latter parts of the film – a shame then that she’s barely a co-lead, the focus remaining solidly on Fleck throughout.
Any asylum-set musical fantasy is bound to bring to mind Zach Snyder’s much-maligned Sucker Punch, which also included musical numbers amidst its escapism – but that film contains feats of imagination that soar way beyond anything in Folie À Deux. With two disturbed people egging each other on, and the ‘real world’ limited to a couple of grim institutions, it’s a shame that all we get for our dissociative fugues are bright lights, soundstages and bad singing. What I would’ve given for one of Snyder’s giant killer Samurai to tear the roof off. Even Paddington 2’s epilogue had better staging than this. At another point, Philips throws in a shot that explicitly references prison-set musical romance Kiss of the Spider Woman. Why someone would willingly invite comparisons between this dull script and that classic is beyond me.
Late in the game events lean into tragedy, and there is, once again, the glimmer of something interesting. Perhaps even a setup for an unusual kind of sequel, although at the press conference later Philips denied it and suggested he had no more plans to return to the franchise. In any case, it’s too little, too late, and by the time the credits rolled on this dirge of a movie there was one thing I wasn’t thinking: That’s Entertainment.
Joker: Folie À Deux premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where the crowd audibly deflated as it limply unspooled, ahead of a theatrical release later this year.