Director – Todd Phillips, Screenplay – Todd Phillips & Scott Silver, Producers – Joseph Garner, Emma Tillinger Koskoff & Todd Phillips, Photography – Lawrence Sher, Music – Hildur Gudnadottir, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ivan Moran, Visual Effects – Barnstorm VFX, Lola Visual Effects & Scanline VFX (Supervisor – Mathew Giampa), Special Effects Supervisor – Brandon O’Dell, Prosthetics Design – Christien Tinsley, Production Design – Mark Friedberg, Animated Sequences – Sylvain Chomet. Production Company – Warner Brothers/Domain Entertainment/Joint Effort Productions.
Cast
Joaquin Phoenix (Arthur Fleck/The Joker), Lady Gaga (Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel), Catherine Keener (Maryanne Stewart), Brendan Gleeson (Jackie Sullivan), Harry Lawtey (Assistant D.A. Harvey Dent), Zazie Beetz (Sophie Dumond), Steve Coogan (Paddy Meyers), Leigh Gill (Harry Puddles), Bill Smitrovich (Judge Herman Rothwax), Ken Leung (Dr Victor Liu), Jacob Lofland (Ricky Meline)
Plot
Arthur Fleck has been committed to Arkham Asylum for his murder spree as The Joker. There Arthur is placed in a music therapy class where he meets fellow inmate Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel who says that she is an admirer of him. The two strike up an instant attraction and begin singing duets together. During a film screening for the inmates, Lee lights a fire and the two attempt to make a getaway before they are stopped. Arthur is now placed on trial for murder where his lawyer Maryanne Stewart attempts to argue that The Joker was an alter ego that took over and that the real Arthur is innocent. As Lee comes to the courtroom each day, Arthur believes that he has found a kindred soul and is in love.
Joker (2019) was a considerable hit when it appeared. Based on The Joker from Batman comics, it imagined an origin story for The Joker (something that has never been never depicted in the comics), showing him as being a failed stand-up comic who snaps. The film was hugely successful earning over a billion dollar in release, making it the then highest grossing R-rated film of all time. It was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award with Joaquin Phoenix winning for Best Actor, as well as a host of other awards. I followed suit and named Phoenix Best Actor of 2019 and placed Joker on my Top 10 list of that year.
Now comes this sequel with Joker: Folie a Deux, reuniting Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips, along with many of the production personnel from the first film. Where Joker receive great plaudits and won a host of awards, Joker: Folie a Deux went almost in the opposite direction and received an almost universally negative reception from fans and critics alike.
For the sequel, Todd Phillips introduces Harley Quinn to the mix. Harley was originally created as a character on the animated Batman (1992-4) tv series to act as a foil and girlfriend to The Joker and was subsequently incorporated into DC Comics continuity. Harley became a breakout character after Margot Robbie’s charged portrayal in Suicide Squad (2016), with Robbie going on to make appearances as Harley in Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020) and The Suicide Squad (2021), as well as Harley being spun off in the animated tv series Harley Quinn (2019- ).
Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) and Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix)
The script also introduces Harvey Dent who, as anyone who follows DC Comics continuity knows, will become Two-Face. Much of the early sections of the film are set at Arkham Asylum, another key locale from the Batman mythos, but this is shown as a dreary institution, not the high security housing for the criminally insane we get in the comics – there are none of the other villains present and this is such a low-key institution, despite the heavy presence of prison-type guards, that it accepts voluntary patients.
When it comes to the assorted DCEU (DC Extended Universe) film adaptations produced from the 2010s onwards, DC Comics have not been as rigorous as enforcing continuity to a single universe as The MCU has during this period. The assorted films of the so-called Snyderverse – Man of Steel (2013), Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Justice League (2017) – and those that derived from it including the aforementioned Suicide Squad films, Wonder Woman (2017), Aquaman (2018), The Flash (2023) etc can be said to be happening in the same universe. On the other hand, there are other works made during this period that certainly fall outside of that continuity such as the Arrowverse tv series’, Joker, The Batman (2022) and from what I can glean the cancelled Batgirl film.
This has a dual effect. While the Snyderverse played mix and match with DC Comics continuity, it generally followed along, in much the same way that the MCU has taken comic-book characters and adapted/reinvented them for their big-screen appearance. This has allowed a creative freedom to some directors like Todd Phillips and before that Christopher Nolan. Few express any disappointment with Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, the first Joker or what finally emerged as Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021).
Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) (c) incarcerated in Arkham Asylum
However, this has not always been a happy mix. The corollary of this is that giving a free hand to creative talents has ended up with some material that has gone wildly off the comic-book page viz the Joker films, while you would also have to add The Batman, about which the fan contingent is still grumbling. The cancelled Batgirl seemed a Batgirl divorced from the comic-book one, while I would add that Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn was an entry where the lead actress ended up hijacking the comic-book character to make her own vanity project.
All of this is very much the case when it comes to Joker: Folie a Deux. You have the feeling that Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix have been emboldened by the reception of Joker so much so that they took its themes and went in a direction of their own fascination with them. This is also a direction that is almost completely divorced from any comic-book Joker by this point and as a result led to the almost complete fan snubbing of the film. Equally at the same time, this is also a Joker that even rebuts the basic themes of the first film.
Perhaps the most bizarre choice made is that Todd Phillips has chosen to make Joker: Folie a Deux as a Musical. Now Phillips denies that the film is a musical and I don’t really want to get into the debate of the difference between a musical and a film that merely has musical numbers in it. The film has repeated scenes where Joaquin Phoenix, frequently in duet with Lady Gaga, breaks out into song and that is sufficient to make it a musical for me.
Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) and Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) celebrate on the courthouse steps
It is not that the musical numbers are bad – and there is one fantasy sequence where Joaquin Phoenix breaks out into song in the courtroom, before being given a gun and shooting the jury and then beating the judge’s head in with a mallet that gets the essence of what The Joker is all about. It is however the fact that the musical numbers and/or fantasies take over the film – sixteen of them, including reworkings of songs from George Gershwin, Burt Bacharach, The Bee Gees and Jacques Brel, among others. I can pretty much guarantee that the DC Comics fans and those who celebrated Joker’s anarchic spirit didn’t come to watch Joker: Folie a Deux to see Joquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga belting out old-time tunes. This focus seems almost a wilful obliviousness on Todd Phillips’ part to the audience that came to see Joker and the substantial fanbase for the comic-book source material.
The other thing that Todd Phillips now does is attempt to expand the arguments that drove Joker about The Joker as the adoption of an alter ego to express rage of an individual at a system that has ignored or neglected them. This was a potent message that seemed to hit home with most audiences. By the time of Joker: Folie a Deux, this has moved in different directions where now we see that The Joker is a character that has gained a fame and a fan following. The courtroom argument made by Catherine Keener’s defence lawyer is that Joker was an alter ego akin to a Split Personality and not the real Arthur Fleck. Various arguments for and against this are made (not ones I am entirely sure would stand up in any real-life courtroom, but hey).
However, the film reaches an ending [PLOT SPOILERS] where Arthur seems to reject this message and to reach a moment of clarity and realisation that is the exact opposite of what he did in Joker and admit there is no Joker persona and he is just a killer, nothing else, and to express remorse for this. I am not sure why Todd Phillips and Joquin Phoenix take things this way. Maybe it was just that Todd Phillips was put off by the claims that Joker was a manifesto for the incel movement and saw the need to repudiate the defiance the first film celebrated and bring everything back down to the dreary everyday world that Arthur inhabited at the start of the first film.
Joker: Folie a Deux is not a bad film on its own terms. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is every bit the towering embodiment of inadequacy and rage it was in the first film, combined with some solid work on the musical numbers. Lady Gaga is very much a love her or hate her face. I am in the category of having no real interest in her music, while her assorted sensation-seeking exploits kind of left me going ‘meh’. She has also made several stabs at acting with assorted roles in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills (2013) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). Whatever else you may want to think about her, I was impressed with her work in American Horror Story: Hotel (2014-5) and especially Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci (2021). It should also be mentioned that she was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born (2018), which I have not seen. And she is not bad here. The only real issue is that while Lady Gaga is up to the task. Todd Phillips’ script is still stuck in puncturing the illusion and bringing everything back down to the world of everyday misery at the end, thus this is a Harleen who never gets to be Harley Quinn. She is stuck as being a supporting character, not the star in her own right that Harley has become elsewhere.
(Nominee for Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
