Reading around online, it would be easy to go into into Joker with a list of talking points in your head before you had even seen the movie. Since its unprecedented win last month of the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the latest comic book tentpole from Warner Bros. and DC Films has become highly politicized—to the point where the idea of it and what it represents is almost a separate thing from the movie itself.
Film festival premieres take place in an online vacuum where larger cultural forces have not yet swept in to surround a movie and define it. On the other side of them comes the escalation (of movie opinions) that Commissioner Gordon warned about at the end of Batman Begins.
Whether it’s a case of critics comparing notes and/or the film telegraphing specific concepts, reviews of Joker have frequently invoked the same buzzwords, such as “incel” and “income inequality.” There’s a lot of hand-wringing, in negative reviews, about the movie’s lack of a clear message. Comparisons abound, across the boards, to the films of Martin Scorsese, while in the background, the shadow of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting hangs over everything.
To be clear, it’s not without good reason that some of these talking points are out there, but now Joker is in theaters and general audiences have had a chance to square their own cinema experience against the pre-release media chatter.
Members of the insane clown posse that is the Internet should probably brace themselves for the backlash to the backlash. However, until such time as a #ReleaseThePhillipsCut petition materializes, let’s not forget that there’s an actual movie with Joker’s name on it to be discussed.
Phoenix and Fleck Rising
The first thing that needs to be said about Joker is that Joaquin Phoenix absolutely holds the screen, from start to finish. Director Todd Phillips has made a feel-bad movie that somehow manages to be gorgeously shot and scuzzy, all at the same time. Handsome panoramas of the cityscape help establish a Gotham without Batman, where a garbage strike has left trash piling up on the streets. Down in the gutters, dwells a man named Arthur Fleck.Arthur is repellant at times but you can’t look away from him because Phoenix is a veritable junkyard magnet. His performance is riveting and the early Oscar buzz for it is well-deserved. If anyone could secure an awards nomination for playing the Joker after Heath Ledger, it would be Phoenix.
Ironically, the latest awards-friendly actor to inherit the Joker mantle was once in a place where his career itself had become something of a joke. After his seeming implosion on Late Night with David Letterman in February 2009, Phoenix became the punchline of a Ben Stiller gag at the 81st Academy Awards. On Letterman, he had announced that he was retiring from acting, crossing over, as actors sometimes do, into bearded hip-hop. If you tuned in on Oscar night, as people often don’t, you would have seen him laughed at by an audience of his peers.
As it turned out, his cringeworthy reinvention as a rapper was part of an Andy-Kaufman-esque, life-as-performance-art stunt for the mockumentary I’m Still Here. Then came his remarkable, animalistic turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which revived his credibility and helped usher in a new heavyweight phase in his acting career. I say “heavyweight,” but of course, Phoenix had lost a lot of weight for the role of Freddie Quell, just as he has for Arthur Fleck. Maybe a better superlative would be “powerhouse.”
Now, ten years after his faux Letterman meltdown, we’re here in 2019. Phoenix, yes, is still here. He’s still got the goods, and just in case you forgot that line from his rap parody — “I don’t even fear fucking fear” — he’s not afraid to physically flaunt them: protruding his shoulder blades and rib cage like…
Full article – https://www.slashfilm.com/joker-spoiler-review/
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