A mesmerising lead performance gives Todd Phillips’s divisive reimagining of the comic villain raw powerSince opening to an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival in August, where it scooped the top prize, Todd Phillips’s origins picture about the birth of Batman’s cackling nemesis has become the focus of a moral backlash, with critics using words such as “toxic”, “cynical” and “irresponsible” to describe its relentlessly embittered (and allegedly glorified) tone. That such terms should be applied to a populist studio picture from the director of the Hangover movies is perhaps unsurprising. Phillips has previously struck gold by appealing to his audience’s basest urges with the kind of nastily nihilistic gross-out comedies that he recently complained have been killed by “woke culture”. Joker, which seems to draw in equal measure on Martin Scorsese’s scabrous media satire The King of Comedy and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, has a similarly dyspeptic worldview, full of characters drunk on a destructive cocktail of enraged self-pity and self-gratification, the latter indulged with an obliterating disregard for consequences. The difference is, this time no one’s laughing.
Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn in The Dark Knight, Joker has an ace card in the form of Joaquin Phoenix’s mesmerisingly physical portrayal of a man who would be king. Reduced to a skeletal state (think Christian Bale in The Machinist, but worse) by a diet of nicotine and pain, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a tragicomic nightmare, a beleaguered, sign-twirling clown who suffers from a medical condition that turns his internal screams into cackling laughter. Bullied, abused and increasingly enraged, Arthur lives with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in Gotham, a city befouled by garbage strikes and overrun by mutant rats. He dreams of becoming a standup comic but has no idea what other people find “funny” – a lethal combination.