Film | Joker, 2019

Joker, 2019

I was not at all prepared for the type of movie that the Joker turned out to be. 

I mean, I thought it would be great… I don’t know much about acting but in my opinion Joaquin Phoenix is a great actor… His performance in “Her” was… out of this world… I mean… It’s one of my favourite movies. There’s this thing he does with his voice, it get’s really soft and quiet at times… I think it’s wonderful… And there’s a bit of that in the Joker as well…

The physical preparation for the part really caught my eye… He looks so thin and.. well… odd I guess, at times… And his dance moves… They are… original… I don’t know… I really liked it…

There were more reasons for me to love this movie thought… The script for one thing… It wasn’t the kind of script that has a lot of “writer lines”. I mean… not a lot of deeply poetic quotes and things like that.. But I liked the flow of the story, specially the way it mixed what was happening in the world with what was happening in his mind. And the path to his becoming the Joker had just the right rhythm… It’s a proper origin movie, only it’s not the origin of a superhero.

The story starts way before he was Batman’s archenemy. Well before there was even Batman… In the beginning, he is Arthur Fleck, a young man who’s trying to make it as comedian, while juggling seven different types of medication and trying to support his mother. She calls him “Happy”… I don’t know enough about Batman Lore to know just how much of his backstory was altered, but I really liked the way the whole thing was presented in the movie… The clown gigs, the violence that was done to him, the paroxysmal laughter attacks… The details kept me interested, they totally transported me to the story… And there was a great job of portraying the Joker as a tridimensional character… He is a villain but there are several layers of complexities that make him seem very, very real. 

One  thing that’s a little boring in comic book adaptations or Disney movies sometimes is that because the characters are well known, it doesn’t feel like the studio really puts any effort into making a great movie… It’s all about side effects and following a certain formula to make sure there’s a certain number of people who will go to the movie theatre to watch… Not this time though… This is a proper movie, one that just happens to be about a character from a comic book… 

A lot of that has to do with how Joaquin Phoenix, I guess… But there are other lthings… I am prone to enjoy most movies in which Fred Astaire makes an appearance. Chaplin was there too, and there was a lot of good music… 

The movie touches on several different discussions, from the treatment of mental illnesses in society, to the uncontrollable nature of a crowd, to the tone-deafness of political figures when it comes to the people they represent. But the movie is never too didactic, it never oversimplifies things, it doesn’t underestimates the audience… That’s like a breath of fresh air… There are a couple of things I would have done differently (I probably would not have shown the attack on Thomas and Martha Wayne, for instance), but that’s just because my “cinematographic vision” is different, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the way it was done.

It was interesting to see how the movie depicts the kind of ignorance that underlines the behaviour of an angry crowd. The some mass of people that embraced the calling for “killing the rich” is the mass of people that glorified the Joker, failing to recognize the extremism of his insanity. The mass doesn’t think, it’s just impulse and reaction… That’s interesting because often times people behave as if some types of hatred are justified… As if some types of moral corruption are okay… And the consequences of that are severe… The consequence is an angry mob cheering on a murderer with a clown face.

I understand this movie is getting a lot of heat already. I have seen reviews claiming it to be a “dangerous movie that supports ‘white terrorism’” – because apparently everything must be graded on a colour spectrum now. There’s concern that the Joker might “provoke terrorism” and that it’s a story that “offers white men a sort of understanding for their violence.” In my opinion, that is absurd. 

Claiming the movie makes the audience “empathize” with a homicidal clown is underestimating the audience, to say the least.  I enjoy movies that make me think about things not movies that try and tell me what exactly I should think. Joker is the first type, but the criticism it has received suggests it should be the second. I might write more about this topic later, I think… I just hope it doesn’t get in the way of Joaquin Phoenix being nominated for best actor at the Oscars. He really deserves it.

When the credits started to slide up the big screen, Sinatra was playing in the background and I couldn’t bring myself to stand up and leave. His voice, echoing through the darkened room of a movie theatre is one of those experiences that can never quite be translated into words… I don’t think it’s something most people would get. I mean… most of the ones who were in the movie theatre stood up to leave. When I finally made my way to the street outside, I had his voice echoing in my mind still…

Joker, 2019 /Directed by Todd Phillips / Written by Todd Phillips, Scott Silver / Joaquin Phoenix