Photo Courtesy of Niko Tavernise/DC
“Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?”
It’s been 30 years since Jack Nicholson reinvented the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman and only a decade since Heath Ledger’s terrifying turn in the role. The bar is high, but Joaquin Phoenix reaches it in Joker. Raw-boned and raw-edged, Phoenix reveals the person behind the pancake makeup and red sneering grin. The wounded man whose pain gives rise to Joker becomes understandable, sympathetic and even worthy to a point of the empathy denied him by society and its citizens.
Joker is the character’s origin story, whose Gotham City is a pre-Bloomberg Manhattan, strike-bound, piled with uncollected trash and overwritten with cryptic graffiti; the window glass of the phone booths and subway trains haven’t met a squeegee in years. Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) works as a clown with a green wig and size 30 shoes, waving an EVERYTHING MUST GO sign outside a failing shop. While trying to drum up business, he’s severely beaten by teenage kids—just because.
And that isn’t the start of Arthur’s problems. The seven prescription meds he’s on can barely elevate him from the abyss. He lives with his ill and possibly deranged mother (Frances Conroy). He meets weekly with a grim social worker whose by-rote job is about to be cut because the city is broke. One of his colleagues at the Ha-Ha Clown Academy gives him a revolver for protection. After it falls from his trouser pockets during his show at children’s hospital, he loses his job.
The gun is transformative. When three drunken Gordon Gekkos from Wall Street spot Arthur’s annoyance at their harassment of a woman on a late-night subway ride, they go after him, singing “Send in the Clowns.” Director Todd Phillips stages the scene with mounting tension and suspense, heightened by the flashes of light and dark as the subway rattles forward on the tracks. We sense from the start that Arthur will draw his gun in self-defense. It’s the beginning of a rapidly accelerating cycle of violence.
Cinema buffs will find many references to classic films. The police search for the clown-garbed Arthur in a subway full of clowns suggests the umbrella scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Robert De Niro plays a condescending comedian-talk show host; Arthur’s dream of appearing on his show recalls the delusional character De Niro played in King of Comedy.
Fans of the Batman comic universe will perk up with the first mention of mayoral candidate Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), depicted as an uncaring plutocrat who derides the financially unsuccessful as “clowns.” Joker ties in with Batman lore in its darkest origins and darker recent iterations. The transformation of Arthur Fleck into Joker dramatizes social problems, starting with mental illness but encompassing class resentment over disparities in wealth and opportunity. At the fiery climax, Arthur-Joker disclaims any specific political agenda and delights in the destruction of the society he resents. “I don’t believe in anything,” he declares. And he will be back.
