Joker review: The most dangerous clown in town

So here’s the most controversial film of the year. When Joker premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, it immediately attracted both five-star reviews and contemptuous put-downs. Time magazine denounced the movie’s “aggressive idiocy” and warned that the hero “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels”. Joker went on to win Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion, nonetheless.

Joker is unlike any other comic book film, deliberately hijacking the genre for its own purposes. There has never been a settled origins story for The Joker, a character introduced in the first Batman story in 1940 and originally intended to be bumped off in the second instalment. If there’s any accepted version, it’s that he fell in a vat of chemical waste and was driven nuts by the disfigurement. So the field was wide open for director and scriptwriter Todd Phillips, and his collaborator Scott Silver, to approach it as they wished, while ostensibly working within the DC Comics world. The standalone film they’ve made has nothing to do with superheroes. It’s a lurid pastiche and amalgamation of Martin Scorsese’s pulpy psychopath classics, Taxi Driver of 1976 and The King of Comedy of 1982, its star a toxic combination of Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin.

Phillips, previously best known for the Hangover trilogy, which pushed being funny into new extremes of pain and damage, hasn’t made this Joker funny at all. This is high impact movie-making, with colours flaring in its ill-lit world, its action sequences full of dramatically framed shots from odd angles, closely modelled on cartoon images, cut together fast so they’re held only as long as you would look at them in a comic, all powered along by a thudding cello-centred score by Hildur Guðnadóttir.

It’s 1981 and we’re in scuzzy Gotham City, or as it might be, Scorsese’s New York. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a mentally disturbed loner, given to boutsof manic humourless cackling, handing out a laminated card to people who are annoyed that reads “Forgive my Laughter: I have a Condition”. He lives in a miserable apartment with his cracked mother Penny (Frances Conroy) who calls him “Happy” and has told him he was put in the world to…

Full article – https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/film/joker-film-review-dangerous-clown-a4253971.html