For all its shortcomings, Joker thrummed with mad volatility. Thus, it’s deflating to discover that, despite being a musical co-starring Lady Gaga, Joker: Folie à Deux tamps down any potential explosiveness, delivering only dreary courtroom drama and perfunctory song-and-dance numbers.
Todd Phillips’ follow-up to his 2019 hit, in theaters Oct. 4, is so determined to avoid satisfying fans that it’s borderline antagonistic, as actively hostile to genre conventions as its protagonist is to the world at large. Worse, the fact that it’s self-conscious about this denial (“I got the sneaking suspicion we’re not giving the people what they want,” remarks its protagonist) doesn’t help alleviate its dullness, lethargy, and dearth of unsettling laughs.
Joker: Folie à Deux is the addendum nobody wanted, a long-form footnote in which the events of Joker are literally relitigated before a jury and the public. Incarcerated in Arkham Asylum following his murder spree, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix, reprising his Oscar-winning role), aka Joker, is now a glum inmate who can’t even muster a joke for guard Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson).
The sole thing that breaks up the monotony of his day—spent in a solitary cell, from which he exits to empty his piss pot and mill around the yard—are visits from his lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), whose plan is to argue that Arthur was inherently “fragmented” by childhood trauma, and that Joker is a separate personality over which he has little control. Arthur doesn’t seem to buy this, but he appears uninterested in his fate and therefore goes along with her plan.
Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga
Niko Tavernise
Arthur’s fortunes (and funny bone) are resurrected when he spies Lee Quinzel (Gaga), i.e. Harley Quinn, singing in a minimum-security music class. As soon as their eyes meet, Arthur comes back to life, and his rebirth continues when Jackie (for no good reason) enrolls him in this workshop.
From the start, the two are a harmonious pair, she fanatically smitten with him and he enraptured by her and the attention she gives him. Unfortunately, Gaga and Phoenix don’t produce many sparks, whether they’re watching a movie with their fellow inmates or breaking into song to express their feelings.
Beginning with Arthur belting out a solo in a recreation room, and soon segueing to fantastical duets on Broadway stages and TV sets (including one that renders the duo a latter-day Sonny and Cher), Joker: Folie à Deux has its leads deliver helter-skelter versions of “You Don’t Know What It’s Like,” “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and other standards whose lyrics speak directly (and clunkily) to the proceedings at hand.
Of those tunes, the most overused is “That’s Entertainment,” which ostensibly relates to the interplay between performance and reality that defines Arthur and his made-for-television plight. Phillips, however, orchestrates his musical sequences with plenty of posing and no verve. The same is true for his drama, most of which is confined to grim Arkham and a drab courtroom where he’s prosecuted by clean-cut district attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), whose presence is apt since he’s destined to become Two-Face and Arthur is a psychopath with warring identities.
The longer he’s loved by Lee, the more Arthur regains his maniacal cackle, yet Phoenix’s Clown Prince is given little to do by the inert film, whose action primarily takes place inside the villain’s mind and involves him prancing about in his trademark suit to Lee’s crooning.
Though it shares with its predecessor a grimy aesthetic and a fondness for depicting Arthur smiling crazily, kicking his leg out in front of him, and stretching his arms wide in lunatic bliss, Joker: Folie à Deux often recalls the series finale of Seinfeld, insofar as it puts its main character on trial for his former misdeeds, and trots out familiar faces to testify against him. Arthur’s neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and little-person colleague Gary (Leigh Gill) both take the stand to talk about his delusions and violence, and Arthur eventually fires Maryanne and opts to represent himself in his Joker make-up.
Even then, however, the film refuses to liberate its fame-hungry baddie from his stodgy judicial confines. It thwarts any possibility of catharsis to the bitter end, and while that unconventionality is, in theory, commendable, it’s insufferable in practice, and Arthur and Lee’s sweet moments alone (including a quick bout of lovemaking) don’t remedy the situation.
Joker: Folie à Deux’s title suggests that Arthur has infected Lee (and much of Gotham’s citizenry, who are tired of the inequitable status quo) with his madness. Yet mostly, Gaga’s Lee is a cipher who exists to stimulate Arthur’s awakening as well as to provide him with musical accompaniment. Phillips and Scott Silver’s script treats her as a device instead of a complementary bifurcated figure, and the multihyphenate’s natural charisma isn’t enough to compensate for the role’s flimsiness.
The film spends the majority of its time and energy on Arthur and the question of whether he’s a tormented soul in need of help or an anarchist eager to watch the city burn. Alas, it does so tediously, via scene after scene that wrongly assumes the precise nature of his mental state is a fascinating focal point.
From making his follow-up a musical and the off-kilter construction of his centerpiece numbers, to the absence of chaotic suspense and the avoidance of a happy ending, Phillips frustrates expectations at every turn. There are times when that against-the-grain tack results in a loopy sort of tension; if nothing else, there’s no guessing where the material is headed. Joker: Folie à Deux’s nonconformity, though, extends to a wholesale disinterest in compelling payoffs—or, for that matter, set-ups, considering that a 138-minute legal saga is just about the least interesting option on which Phillips and company could have settled. It’s a crime to make the DC Comics icon this lackluster, and to neuter Phoenix’s live-wire scariness through endless psychoanalysis.
Joker: Folie à Deux is ultimately a finger in the eye of Joker enthusiasts and, more generally, superhero movie die-hards. If that makes it something its clownish antihero might find amusing, it’s less likely to have the same effect on everyone else.
