Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz

Directed by Todd Phillips

Warner Bros., out October 5

Arthur Fleck is struggling with day-to-day life as a clown. He wants to be a stand-up comedian, while also being a good son, but things are changing in Gotham City.

Todd Phillips’ tale of Batman’s nemesis must surely be the most divisive mainstream movie of the year. After being feted at movie festivals it has had a backlash in some quarters (even here, as you can read below!) and now there’s a backlash to the backlash! Wherever you fall, surely Joaquin Phoenix’s performance can’t be faulted. He’s in pretty much every scene, and he’s spellbinding.

Right from the retro Warner Brothers logo that opens the movie, we’re thrown into a grimy 1981 Gotham (Blow Out and Zorro the Gay Blade are showing at the cinema) – it’s that awful extreme vision of New York or LA’s Skid Row where crime is happening all around. Naive Fleck is offered a gun by a clown co-worker following an attack in an alley, but is then fired for taking the firearm to a children’s hospital ward. Things escalate and before long he has blood on his hands, and eventually his face.

Gotham is a tinderbox just waiting to erupt – the poor are looking for an excuse to rise up, and they find a hero in the form of a clown. I’ll deliberately steer clear of how this movie touches the wider Batman universe, but it’s telling that it’s not being sold as a DC property – it’s not a superhero movie. Hildur Guonadottir’s minimal and minimalist score is wonderful – the soundtrack to Fleck’s descent, a world away from a Danny Elfman or Alan Silvestri fanfares.

More Taxi Driver or Death Wish (with shades of V for Vendetta) than any other Joker iteration, this circle of hell offers no relief (though plenty of inappropriate laughs) for its occupants, and they really need a Dark Knight to turn the tide. It’s very violent – shockingly so at one point – and you’ll surely be talking about it for some time afterwards.

Verdict: A shocking, grownup excursion for Warner Brothers, the antithesis to their last DC project (Shazam!) Does it glamorise violence or trivialise mental illness? I don’t think so, but it’s uncomfortable viewing and packs the sort of punch that Batman has never done in a movie. 9/10

Nick Joy

Mentally unstable loner Arthur Fleck tries his best to make his way in life, working as a clown for hire and looking after his sick mother in 1981 Gotham. But when life finally punches down on him one too many times, Arthur will transform from downtrodden victim to something else entirely.

Todd Phillips is really happy that he managed to get Joaquin Phoenix in his Joker movie. You can tell, because a substantial proportion of the film (easily more than half) consists of long, drawn out closeups of Phoenix’s face and/or tortured, twisted looking body as sad, sonorous cellos blare out a dirge of a score, underlining just how very serious everything is. It’s natural for a film that’s been built around a star for it to present that star as often as possible (Phillips has spoken of writing the script with a picture of Phoenix taped to the wall above him). But that presentation feeds into part of the larger fundamental issue that the film has.

You see, the Joker is potentially a fascinating creature to study. Of all Batman’s extensive villains gallery, he’s the one who gets revisited the most, and from whom the greatest, most memorable performances tend to be wrung. Nicholson’s capering psychotic mob enforcer-turned-crime lord. Ledger’s magnetic, predatory anarchist, Hamill’s terrifying laughing scamp. There’s something inherently ridiculous about clowns, and something instantly jarring about a guy in clown makeup who does the things that Joker does. Much of the enduring appeal has been the mystery – in comics and film, the Joker has rarely had a fixed origin point or story – he’s just there because he is. Nicholson’s/Burton’s Joker was the first major attempt at giving that backstory, and even back then it felt a little contrived, kept afloat by the committed performances of both Nicholson and Keaton.

But Joker isn’t here to study its title character at all, so much as to present him uncritically to the audience, shining a spotlight on the guy who constantly complains he’s alone in the world and nobody notices him. It feels not so much like a film that’s based on the ‘manifestoes’ of the sort of violent young men who shoot up schools because they were rejected by women and more like one of those manifestoes itself. The lurid, voyeuristic way it drinks in Arthur’s endless suffering in the first act then seamlessly transitions into the same lurid voyeuristic viewpoint of the crimes he goes on to commit. Never at any juncture does the film attempt to step away and analyse its central character’s rapid descent into horrific violence, merely sitting on his shoulder and going along for the ride.

The problem with that isn’t so much that it makes the film dangerous, as some vocal critics have breathlessly reported. The sort of people who do the things Arthur does here would always find an excuse, be it a film, a song or some other influence consumed harmlessly by millions of others. But it does make it inexcusably empty for a movie with such a talented actor at its centre and with such openly declared pretensions at being something more. It desperately wants to be a deep, serious character piece, Phillips making clear multiple times that this was – in his words – a ‘real’ film as opposed to ‘just’ a comic book one. That apparent disdain for the genre seems doubly ironic given how far wide of its target the film manages to land, to say nothing of how much it pulls from elsewhere.

Yes, the movie that would present Joker ‘in a world without Batman’ sure does a good job of aping (consciously or otherwise) various elements from previous entries in the Bat Canon. One concept is lifted pretty much wholesale from Burton’s 1989 vehicle. A couple of shots instantly call to mind Nolan’s The Dark Knight. And the grinding, repetitive, invasive heavy chords of the soundtrack recall Zimmer/Junkie XL’s attempts to convey all the portentousness and gravity that Snyder’s Batman v Superman didn’t have, and to much the same effect here. That’s before we get to the little ‘nods’ that had the audience I was sat with chuckling, and a repetition of one scene that I honestly don’t think anyone who’s been to the cinema in the last thirty years or so needed to see again.

When it isn’t throwing in these references, it’s aping the work of Scorsese, though again arguably without any of the nuance or depth of that catalogue. Though I’m not familiar with the works of Scorsese myself, pop culture awareness means that I am familiar enough with certain elements to recognise when they are being referenced. Travis Bickle’s most famous scenes are a form of universal cinematic shorthand, and here they are deployed with about as much sense of their weight as you might expect to find in the average Scary Movie level of parody.

As in love with Phoenix as the camera is, it means that everyone around him gets short changed. Zazie Beetz, who basically stole every scene of Deadpool 2 in which she appeared, here gets utterly wasted in a role which emphasises just how much the director has missed the point of his subject. She’s a disposable ‘love-interest’ of such fleeting importance as a character in her own right that the film literally disposes of her halfway through, with her never being seen again, nor her eventual fate ever explained. Nobody else really gets to be a character, more acting as archetypes to emphasise Arthur’s own pain/sense of righteousness.

And then there’s the mental health aspect. Early on, the film makes it clear that Arthur has ‘problems’. The ‘ingenious’ way the film presents our protagonist’s signature laugh is that he has a condition, caused by brain injury, which causes him to laugh uncontrollably and maniacally at times when it’s not appropriate (or even relevant). Like so many other lazy adaptations over the years, the film never really seeks to engage with this part beyond a cursory backstory as to how Arthur became ‘mad’. Part of the issue is a purely narrative one – because Arthur is framed by the film as an unreliable narrator in a fairly ham-fisted way, it becomes difficult to separate the events onscreen into things which are actually happening vs things which are part of the main character’s delusion. It’s possible that Philips is doing this intentionally as a feature rather than a bug, but if so, its effect (for this viewer) was simply to undermine large parts of the movie. On the one hand, certain elements which are definitely not real might actually have served to build something of a better or at least less predictable narrative arc for the character. On the other, it serves to make the viewer question whether any of the third act is really happening at all. And not in the good, ‘this is challenging me’ kind of way so much as the irritated ‘what the hell is actually going on here?’ kind of way.

That lack of structural integrity to the narrative runs through the rest of the film as well. It’s not really clear why Arthur’s initial crime sparks the massive revolution in Gotham that it does – you just have to accept that it does because that’s where the director wants to go. It’s never really clear why a lot of the characters around Arthur react in the ways they do, they just have to so that Phillips can get to the next scene he wants to present. It means that the whole thing just doesn’t hang together as a narrative story, leading us back to it just being the angry, entitled manifesto of its violent central character.

Even in the ‘adult’ aspects so trumpeted by director and studio in the run up to release, the film feels oddly shy. The violence is never quite so graphic as you might expect, and the language, while occasionally coarse, feels very deliberately tightened to some ticklist of acceptable words and the number of times they may be used. It’s odd, in a film so desperate to be seen as edgy and dark, to physically feel that sense of restraint in the one area it doesn’t really need it.

Ironically, having laid down such a clear line in the sand between the ‘Snyder-verse’ and the ongoing DC film slate, the studio here has served up a movie about one of the franchise’s most iconic villains which would have fitted in very well with the previous DCEU. It fundamentally misunderstands its central character and his appeal, just like Snyder. It confuses ‘darkness’ for its own sake with gravity, and it takes itself far more seriously than its barely-there surface reading of a narrative does anything to merit. Even the score reminds me of the sonorous, monotonous pounding of the Snyder movies as it tries to convince you that IMPORTANT THINGS ARE HAPPENING by bludgeoning your eardrums into submission. Where we were promised something fresh, we got something hugely derivative. Where we were told we would get a Joker film with no connections to the Bat-Verse, we got the exact opposite, and where we were led to expect a serious, adult take on the genre, we got a vapid, child-like adulation of a monster barely worthy of the title.

Verdict: mundane, surface-level trash which aspires to be so very much more than it ever is, but has no real idea of how to get there. Certainly the worst Joker film I have ever seen, and challenging Leto’s Suicide Squad portrayal for levels of wrong-headedness. Phoenix and his character deserved so much better. 1/10

Greg D. Smith