An air of menace and a cloud of controversy accompany the arrival of the new ‘Joker’ movie with the portrayal of the most famous villain in comic book history being arguably the most chilling twist on the character in 50 years.
‘Joker,’ starring Joaquin Phoenix, opened in movie theaters worldwide this week after winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last month.
There are no capes, no special powers and no battles between good and evil in the new film and the character has undergone a series of ever darker transformations from his early days as a campy clown with a mirthless laugh.
So how do the reviews for this highly anticipated – yet brutally violent – film stack up with critics?
When the film first aired at the Venice Film Festival in August, The Hollywood Reporter suggested it was the best Batman-adjacent movie since ‘The Dark Knight’ and predicted huge box office numbers.
‘The must-see factor of Phoenix’s riveting performance alone – it’s both unsettling and weirdly affecting – will be significant,’ the review read.
But as ‘Joker’ hit cinemas in the U.S. on Friday, the critics appear to have mixed feelings.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern urged people to think of ‘Joker’ as ‘both dental drill and Novocain’ given it leaves you feeling numb and glum.
‘Why should such a remarkable performance, so many spectacular images and such vaulting pretensions to social commentary amount to not much? The answer may lie in the movie’s relentless manipulativeness,’ he said.
‘Literal pain can’t be transmitted from screen to audience, but anxiety can, and the production is a nonstop generator of anxiety, a poor substitute for dramatic intricacy. If you’re feeling insufficiently anxious in your life, ‘Joker’ could be just the ticket. If not, look elsewhere to be entertained.’
A.O. Scott, of the New York Times, was more scathing about the hype and controversy that was stirred up surrounding the film ahead of its release.
He referenced the concerns people had about the film’s potential ability to stir up real-life violence and the director’s counter-backlash of that argument.
‘We are now at the phase of the argument cycle when actual ticket buyers have a chance to see what all the fuss is about, which means that it’s also time for me to say my piece. And what I have to say is: Are you kidding me?’ he said.
‘To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it.
‘Joker,’ an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that. Besotted with the notion of its own audacity – as if willful unpleasantness were a form of artistic courage – the film turns out to be afraid of its own shadow, or at least of the faintest shadow of any actual relevance.’
It was described as a ‘viewing experience of rare, numbing emptiness’ by the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody.
”Joker’ is a wannabe movie that also wants to be all things to all viewers, that imitates the notion of adding substance while only subtracting it,’ he wrote.
‘Phoenix, alternately brooding and exulting, dancing extravagantly in his underwear or in a resplendent costume or seething with rage, cringing with horror, or camping it up with an affected accent, isn’t so much unhinged as unmotivated and, to all appearances, undirected.
‘What he delivers is less a performance than a display of his bag of actorly tricks – and they’re pretty wonderful, but they adorn a character who’s an empty framework, and, to all appearances, empty by design, for fear of alienating the target audience.’
Jake Coyle, of the Associated Press, described it as a ‘calculatedly combustible concoction, designed, like its chaos-creating character, to cause a stir’.
‘I wish it was as radical as it thinks it is,’ he said.
‘Instead, ‘Joker’ is a mesmerizing, misjudged attempt to marry the madness of a disturbed individual to today’s violent and clownish times. It’s a shallow, under-examined movie that renders the dark descent of a troubled man with an operatic fervor.
‘Rather than surround Arthur´s horrifying transformation with context, alternatives or rays of light whether they fall on him or not ‘Joker’ simply hitches a ride on his freefall in mania.’
Peter Bradshaw, of the Guardian, described ‘Joker’ as ‘this year’s biggest disappointment.’
He stated that Phoenix’s portrayal could have had the same impact of Ledger’s, more than a decade before, had it not have been for the ‘realist detail and overblown ironic noir grandeur.’
The story ‘loses your interest,’ after the Joker character finally snaps in a ‘terrible revenge bloodbath,’ Bradshaw wrote. From there ‘tedious and forced material’ ensues with a ‘supposed triggering of anti-capitalist, anti-rich movement.’
‘The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow.’
‘It’s predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody,’ wrote Dana Stevens of Slate.
She felt the film was hard to watch, not for gore and cinematic violence, but instead due to ‘claustrophobia and boredom.’
Stevens advised it was a film viewers should ‘skip’ in favor of other movies due to it not living up to its pre-cinema release hype.
Vanity Fair wrote that the film could be seen as ‘irresponsible propaganda for the very men it pathologizes,’ and suggested the film could be seen as giving justification to mass shooters.
They added that police would be stationed inside random movie theaters in both New York and Los Angeles to avoid anything like what happened at the screening of Batman Dark Knight Rises in 2012.
The incident in Aurora, Colorado, saw James Eagan Holmes kill 12 and injure 70 after setting off tear gas grenades and shooting audience members with multiple firearms.
Glen Weldon, of NPR, thought that Phillips’ greatest faux pas was stripping ‘all the mystery’ from the Joker character, citing historically how the villain’s motivations for committing acts of violence were never fully understood.
He felt the titular character’s transformation to a ‘mass murderer’ seemed ‘inevitable’ and ‘not a choice; it’s something the world does to him.’
‘It devotes so much of its energy into not being about a comic book villain that it neglects being about … much of anything, really,’ Weldon added.
David Sims of the Atlantic thought the film had all the ‘pulpy origins’ of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but ‘missed their underlying sardonic bite.’
The effort to bring realism to the Joker’s story mean that Phillips ‘lost his grasp on the character’s symbolic purpose,’ he wrote. ‘Treating the audience to something undeniably visceral but also unacceptably shallow.’
Sims felt the violence turned the flick into ‘little more than a horror show’ and from there eradicated ‘any chance at insight’ into the character.
CNET‘s Richard Trenholm praised how Phillips built tension and menace ‘toward the inevitable explosion’ but felt that without a clear-hero in the story ‘it was hard to see the point.’
He added that instead of competing with films like Taxi Driver, it ‘feels less like a genuine artistic statement and more like one of several cringy attempts to be edgy.’
Trenholm wrote that the film was ‘intense’ and ‘free of capes and other superhero nonsense’ but that it lacked substance.
He highlighted that the films ‘Joker’ paid homage to were released 40 years ago and now ‘maybe the joke isn’t funny any more.’
We’ve had Jokers before, but this monstrously memorable creation does something the others couldn’t: BRIAN VINER reviews Joker
Joker
Verdict: Brutal but brilliant
Rating: 
Judging by some of the more excitable reports about the release of this electrifying movie, you would expect it to come not just with an 18 certificate, rather than the 15 it carries, but also a public health warning.
Certainly, it is dark, violent and disturbing enough for an 18, a triple-whammy that not everyone wants from a night out at the pictures.
It is also superbly conceived, written, directed and acted. Moreover, for a film with a comic-book lineage, telling the story of how Batman’s arch-enemy came into being, it is refreshingly free of computer-generated effects.
Nor does Joaquin Phoenix, extraordinary in the title role, offer the standard caricature of super-villainy.
Comic-book movies often do terrific business at the box-office without ever turning the heads of those who dish out awards.
Joker has already confounded that tradition. It deservedly won the main gong, the Golden Lion, at last month’s Venice Film Festival.
That’s where I saw it first, practically staggering from the cinema into the dazzling late-summer sunlight of the Venice Lido.
On Monday, in London, I saw it again. The conditions couldn’t have been more different; we were greeted afterwards by driving autumnal rain. But the impact was the same. The weather was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Joker is a thunderously powerful character study of a man with a mental illness, and a ferocious indictment of a society that doesn’t treat the mentally ill with the same compassion it shows to, say, cancer sufferers.
That might make it sound worryingly like a cinematic lecture, but it’s not Ken Loach behind the camera, it’s Todd Phillips, who directed the Hangover films. Joker is still an exercise in entertainment. Indeed, I have rarely been so grippingly entertained.
Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, who lives with his fragile mother (Frances Conroy) in a ramshackle apartment building in Gotham City. It is 1981. Gotham is New York City, blighted by crime, uncollected garbage and industrial unrest, in gossamer-thin disguise.
A rich, ruthless industrialist called Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is campaigning to become mayor, to get Gotham back on its feet.
Those of you who recall the Batman origin story should note that he has a young son called Bruce. If you also keep an eye on contemporary U.S. politics, you might wonder whether Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver used Donald Trump as their model.
Arthur, meanwhile, is just about holding down a job as a professional clown, available for cheap promotional stunts, children’s hospital visits, that sort of thing.
He is disturbed, a loner with a Tourettes-style condition that compels him to laugh loudly and suddenly for no reason. He makes weekly visits to a social worker, who organises his medication, but Gotham’s social services are being cut to the bone.
Soon he will have nowhere to turn. ‘The worst thing about having a mental illness,’ he writes in his journal, ‘is that people expect you to behave as if you don’t.’ Arthur dreams of being a stand-up comedian.
His hero is a TV talk-show host, Murray Franklin, splendidly played by Robert De Niro in a conspicuous nod to Martin Scorsese’s 1982 satire The King Of Comedy.
In that film, De Niro himself played the deranged stand-up comic, who was obsessed with a TV host played by Jerry Lewis. So Phillips and Silver don’t mind acknowledging their influences. Another great Scorsese movie, Taxi Driver, from 1976 is invoked, too.
Yet Joker is luminously original in the background it weaves for one of comic-book fiction’s greatest baddies, and in the way it does so. Boldly, it even dares to let us sympathise with Arthur. He is creepy, yes; but victimised and misunderstood. Even when he commits his first murders, he has the audience’s empathy.
It is doubtful whether any actor of his generation could have inhabited the role quite like Phoenix does.
The late Heath Ledger’s Joker, in The Dark Knight (2008), cast an extremely long shadow.
But I think Phoenix steps out of it. He has always been brilliant at conveying torment, for instance as Johnny Cash in Walk The Line (2005), and in The Master (2012), while of course he was a memorable villain in Gladiator (2000). That face helps; even in repose it looks slightly psychotic.
Gotham is teetering on the brink of civil strife and it turns out to be Arthur, of all insignificant citizens, who nudges it over the edge.
The man wanted for murder had a painted clown face, and suddenly clown masks are everywhere, a symbol of proletarian anger against Wayne and other masters of the universe.
As riots erupt in the streets, Arthur is assailed by a personal crisis. He learns startling details about the circumstances of his birth.
Perhaps even more unexpectedly, he is invited to be a guest on The Murray Franklin Show, following the broadcast of a video of him dying, in comedic terms, in his stand-up debut.
It is the 1980s, so we can’t say that his humiliation goes viral, but Phillips is clearly taking a pop at modern social media.
Like The King Of Comedy, Joker is a satire; an unforgettably brutal and brilliant one. So never mind, for the time being at least, the warnings that it could have a dangerous effect on already troubled minds.
Right now, everyone involved should be hugely proud of their creation, especially Phillips and Phoenix, but also executive producer Bradley Cooper.
The last film his production company made was A Star Is Born (2018). This one, the first in a new franchise called DC Black, an offshoot from the DC Extended Universe series, could be subtitled A Supervillain Is Born. And how.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7537611/Critics-slam-new-brutally-violent-Joker-film.html
It’s only my opinion, but I thought the film was a masterpiece, almost perfect. I took it as a statement on society at large. Hard to understand such condemning reviews. Might be a by-product of the extreme political correctness we are currently wading in. It actually seemed to be exposing the insanity of the masked (Antifa?) protesters. It was telling us why violence and mayhem exist in a world today that is poisoned and suffering in so many ways. The film isn’t selling gratuitous violence but rather using violence to show how society makes it to such a point.
Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was the rawest acting I’ve ever experienced. Nothing held back. One man’s effort to rise above the horrible hand existence has dealt him. One man’s story of continued attempts to make life work yet is perpetually sabotaged by the system itself. I think this one slipped through and is actually some kind of warning of where things are heading. I kept thinking of the sanity of The Bill of Rights and how it could set things right. Too bad it has to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
Only my opinion.
🙂
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thank you galen
Thanks, Mary. And I am a tough film critic. Would not give kudos unless something profound or extraordinary happens.
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