05 Oct Folie à Doo-Doo?

Joker: Folie à Deux is not a terrible movie, but it is a terrible sequel.

The first Joker film is a love letter to the films of Martin Scorsese, specifically Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. In so far as the city of Gotham is a prominent character, there are a few other 1970s influences in there, too, from Marathon Man  to Fort Apache The Bronx.

If Todd Phillips’ had limited his vision to another pastiche of 1970s American Maverick directors, he might have been accused of repeating himself, but he would at least have been giving the people what they want.

Here, Todd has chosen Miloš Foreman as his mentor. Folie à Deux is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hair with the detached mean-spiritedness of Valmont.

Foreman’s American movies (like those of Wim Wenders) succeed because they are America as seen through the eyes of a foreigner. European New Wave filmmakers tackled the unique complexities of modern life distilled to simple observations, built upon vignettes that are all tethered to a single narrative, and then punctuated by great epiphanies of triumph and tragedy.

There is nothing triumphant about Joker: Folie à Deux, nor is there anything that suggests it is the sequel to a film that earned more than a billion dollars at the office. In fact, this film is less a sequel than a side quest.

Phillips and Scott Silver’s screenplay does nothing to advance the character of Arthur Fleck and even walks back a bit of the Joker’s story. While the two leads are perfectly fine and deliver very lived-in performances, the whole purpose of Folie à Deux seems to be an apology for the first film.

Those who may have been wary of this being marketed as a musical will perhaps be relieved that there is less Man of La Mancha than Magnolia. Though taken from the Great American Songbook, there’s an organic presentation of the musical numbers that strips away the show business. What’s left is akin to singing in public wearing headphones. That’s something we’ve all experienced and it never pulls us out of reality. We sometimes call that Main Character Syndrome, and that’s perhaps the main affliction shared by Joker and Harleen Quinn. The movie’s biggest affliction is a lack of whimsy.

Its predecessor, as dark as it was, had moments of levity that were perfectly timed between moments of great tension. A film that is all tension might as well be a film with no tension, and it’s hard to pinpoint which was Phillips’ intention this time.

If he had wanted to complete the Joker’s origin story, he failed completely. In fact there is a blatant disregard for doing so that makes the ending even more frustrating. Lady Gaga is at her best and I’m sure I’m not the only audience member that left the theater wishing the filmmakers had opted to do a Harley Quinn solo film instead. This is a version of the character that we’ve never seen; not in movies and definitely not in the comics. Running astray of the source material is generally never a good idea, and the Joker/Harley dynamic here is almost the polar opposite of their admittedly problematic comic book romance. But it’s interesting. Surprising, even. And that raises the shame of not giving us a full Harley origin story since furthering Joker’s arc wasn’t the goal, either. Joker: Folie à Deux is neither fish nor fowl and it commits a greater sin than being be bad: it’s boring.

When Oliver Stone brought Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers to the screen, he took a pulpy lovers on the run spec script and turned into a high-octane evisceration of media. NBK is at its best when it exposes the intersection of news and exploitation. Whether or not you feel the film succeeds depends upon your affinity for excess, but even its critics recognize it as much for being a cautionary tale as a morality play.

Todd Phillips understood the assignment with Joker, but he completely lost the plot with its sequel. One wishes the courtroom scenes in Folie à Deux were as volatile and dangerous as those in Natural Born Killers. The sight of a psychopathic serial killer in full clown make-up representing himself in court for a death penalty murder trial should be the very essence of menace, and yet Phillips has drained any sense of urgency or the macabre from the proceedings. If not for Zazie Beetz and Leigh Gill returning for excellent cameos, you could have (and probably should have) cut the whole trial scene. But that would limit the film to a single location.

There are a lot of great prison movies, from Papillon to Escape From Alcatraz, to Shawshank Redemption to Bronson to Brawl in Cell Block 9. In those films, the prisons are a main character, too. There is a brief scene in Joker where Arthur visits Arkham Asylum seeking to establish his paternity. That real-world version of the storied criminal hospital is straight out of Jacob’s Ladder and it contributes greatly to the desperate horror that is Arthur’s daily existence. The amber lighting and budget-cut decreptitude lends authenticity to the era, and both installments of Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom and Peter Berg’s excellent (and underrated) Wonderland have been cited as likely references. The Arkham Asylum we see in Folie à Deux is one of the only appeasements to Batman readers: it’s the same island-isolated gothic fortress from the comic books. And it sticks out like a sore thumb in this otherwise reality-based film universe. The interiors and even the staging of several scenes look cribbed from Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, but without his signature fish-eye lens cinematography or jump cut editing. Without that added flair, Arthur’s incarceration digs come off a bit vanilla, which is ultimately the problem with the movie as a whole.

Joker‘s success was a surprise. It was pitched as a one off –probably in an attempt to woo a commercially viable director of comedies to do more traditional superhero movies at DC studios. They probably got more than they bargained for, but that bargain absolutely paid off; bigly, as another clown might say.

They also got cold feet.

The original ending, with Joker atop a crashed police car, triumphant as chaos ensues all around him, was deemed potentially dangerous during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests and Alt-right neo-Nazi rallies. So they tacked-on that goofy slapstick ending, to soften it and perhaps pay a bit of tribute to original clown-prince of crime, Cesar Romero. When the box-office opened strong and continued to grow past the billion dollar mark, it was a foregone conclusion that this was no longer a one-off. And just like the Matrix sequels, the problem of continuing a story that was written to be self-contained is evident in its follow-up.

I find it hard to believe that the guy behind three Hangover movies had a problem with repetition, so how did Folie à Deux wind-up both bland and befuddlingly different?

Why didn’t Warner Bros. follow the tried-and-true formula of upping the ante and amplifying the action for a sequel?

Because they don’t know what it was about the first film that caught the zeitgeist.

Shooting during the 2020 shutdown injected a sense of dark irony that mirrored the society of today while perfectly capturing the past. That’s an irreproducable phenomenon. Joker was a blockbuster disguised as an arthouse picture. Folie à Deux is an arthouse talkie hoping for a blockbuster audience. It’s a weird gamble, like betting it all on green on a roulette wheel (the odds of winning being 35:2).

Once again, DC Studios have hedged their bets, but the compromises here are far greater and seem likely to please noone. Without revealing a spoiler, I can say that the final scene connects this Elseworlds story directly to the DC canon in a way that nobody asked for nor indeed wanted. It seems almost more superfluous than the bloody clown shoe chase at the end of the first film. Worse —we know nothing more about Arthur Fleck nor the Joker after two hours and eighteen minutes than we did beforehand.

There is a precedent for severe tonal shifts between sequels, but for every Sympathy for Lady Vengeance or Army of Darkness there’s Moonraker and The Howling III: Marsupials. While destined to be labeled Folie à Doo-Doo, Todd Phillips’ film is not as bad as Conan the Destroyer but it’s also not as much fun. It has its moments, but it’s a great disappointment coming on the heels of something so innovative.

Perhaps it was that very aspiration for innovation that proved its undoing. ♥♠