First things first: Setting aside for a moment the pronounciation differences, let me hereby christen Joaquin Phoenix’s take on DC’s decades old supervillain the “Joaquer.”
And much like what I just did there, Joaquin’s Joaquer in Joker is something different, something memorable, and yet somehow not quite right — but I can’t stop thinking about it. #SoMeta #Joaquer
I’m tempted to swaddle myself in the fuzzy cloak of context and begin by bemoaning every post-Nolan DC film save Wonder Woman. But you know what? Let’s just do what director Todd Phillips did (yes, that Todd Phillips – Old School, The Hangover) and flush all that down the stinking toilet. It doesn’t matter. Certainly not when Phillips sets out to make a bleak, sometimes grating, frequently unpleasant, no doubt divisive, but unquestionably powerful and ultimately memorable period piece that’s either about isolation, social unrest, and mental illness, or about nothing whatsoever at all. I loved it.
Joaquin’s performance is frankly incredible. I’m not easily swayed by actors chasing glinty hardware, but I don’t think that’s what this is; there’s something raw and deep and magnetic about Phoenix’s total immersion in this character. It would’ve been easy to just phone in a “good enough” performance, to give audiences what they expect to see (ahem, Jared Leto in Suicide Squad) and nothing more.
But Phoenix doesn’t. Undergoing a full physical and mental transformation (and using his own apparently dislocated shoulder to dramatic visual effect), Phoenix delivers a powerhouse performance that’s unmatched in recent memory.
Say what you want about this strange reboot origin story, but Joaquin Phoenix has made this character his own in a way no one—not Nicholson, not even Ledger—has so far done. For the first time, we come close to perhaps understanding the Joker. One scene, where he laughs uncontrollably and uncomfortably while handing a well-worn laminated card to an onlooker (“sorry, I have a mental condition…”) does more for this character in ten seconds than seventy years of storytelling. Astonishing stuff.
I don’t know how his Joaquer fits into the Batman fabric—it’s frankly not clear that he does—but I don’t care. He’s a standalone marvel and it’s worth seeing this movie just for this.
This is not a Batman (or even a comic book) film—it’s a trudging study of an isolated and mentally ill clown in late-70s New York (aka Gotham) who lives with his mother and struggles to fit in. He’s beaten down and pushed away and mocked and marginalized again and again and again. Phoenix makes him at times sympathetic, yet always creepy enough to push us back to arm’s length. And it’s fascinating to watch Phoenix as his Joaquer slowly molts, shedding his punching-bag skin and emerging as a homicidal maniac over the course of the film.
It’s not all roses, as the story is not without substantial issues. What little plot there is ricochets between almost touching and strangely tone-deaf. While it does go in fascinating new directions (could the Joker have created the Batman, not the other way around?), it also plays too loose with its unreliable narrator. Did such-and-such really happen, or did it not? Did the whole story happen at all, or is it all just the musings of some nutcase in Arkham (who, for all we know, might not even be the Joker)? I don’t begrudge deus ex machina reveals (Fight Club?) if they’re coherent, but here, they’re not. You might be left wondering whether anything you saw actually happened, actually mattered, or actually stood for anything at all.
Which is, in one sense, the beauty of it. The current, neo-Nolan fashion is to portray Joker as a sort of armchair nihilist, an agent of chaos, a man who disrupts for the sake of disruption. (Sounds like a unicorn pitch at Sequoia Capital.) So what better vehicle for his latest imagining than a movie that, itself, doesn’t know, or even care, what it is? What sort of film purports to raise hot-button issues (mental illness, domestic abuse, societal inequality) and then do basically nothing with them? Is this some sort of dadaistic, Andy Kaufman, joke’s-on-the-audience performance piece?
Doesn’t matter. What a movie. I loved it even if I didn’t often like it, and I can’t get the Joaquer out of my head.
Haus Verdict: Joaquin’s Joaquer in Joker is phenomenal, even if the story he inhabits often is not. I loved it. You may not, but see it regardless.
Joker opens today, Friday October 4.
Never miss a review — sign up for email updates to the right, follow us on Twitter, or like The Parsing Haus on Facebook!