In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’ desperate-to-be-darkly-irreverent but actually rather clunky and earthbound musical sequel to “Joker,” Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the sad-sack incel who turned himself into a homemade psycho-killer version of Joker, is about to go on trial for his crimes. In theory, this would seem to be a good thing, since Arthur doesn’t get out much. At Arkham State Hospital, he lives in a small grimy cell from which he’s released each morning so that he can skulk down the corridor with his bucket of pee and pour it into a sink. Arthur is now skin and bones, his face creased with despair. The guards, led by the jaunty sadist Jackie (Brendan Gleeson), keep asking him, “You got a joke for us today?” But Arthur is out of jokes, and out of smiles. He’s back to being a paragon of miserablism.
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Of course, he is also now famous — so famous for killing the late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin on live television that they actually made a TV-movie about him. “Everybody still thinks you’re a star,” says Jackie. He’s right. The whole world knows who Arthur is. A lot of people hate him, but at least one person at Arkham, an inmate named Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), with two-tone platinum hair and a gaze of scraggly desperation, adores him. She has seen that TV-movie countless times. When he walks into the room, her eyes light up. The rest of the world may think he’s a nutcase, but she looks at him and sees…Joker.
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Arthur’s trial is sure to be a media event. It’s set to be broadcast on live television, and Arthur, in preparation, submits to a jailhouse interview with Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan), a tabloid-TV figure who baits and taunts him. Arthur responds by singing, in a dry cracked voice, “I’m wild again, beguiled again…,” launching into “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” from the 1940 musical “Pal Joey.” If you’re surprised to hear him reach into such an old-time song book, get used to it. A great many of the songs Arthur sings in “Folie à Deux” — “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” “That’s Entertainment!” — sound like they came out of your grandmother’s record collection.
At last, the trial begins, the whole thing spinning around one key question. No one disputes that Arthur killed Murray Franklin and four other people; even Arthur admits it. The only issue is whether he will be declared insane, which would save him from the death penalty. His lawyer, played by that tough nut Catherine Keener, argues that Arthur didn’t really commit the crimes, because he’s got a split personality, a deranged alter ego, a hidden identity that takes him over. But the Gotham City district attorney, Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), argues that Arthur does not have a split personality. He’s not two people, says Dent. He’s just sick, sad Arthur. So he should be held responsible for his actions and found guilty.
This debate is the fulcrum of “Joker: Folie à Deux.” It’s even forecast by the film’s opening sequence: a mock ’40s Warner Bros. cartoon in which a backstage Broadway version of Arthur is literally taken over by his homicidal shadow (all set to the tune of “Me and My Shadow”). But the reason it’s odd, and rather unexciting, to hear the film chew over the split-personality question ad nauseam is that “Joker” already excavated it in a most spectacular way. The premise of the first movie, which treated Arthur as a scuzzy sociopath out of a Scorsese fever dream, is that unlike the dark-side characters in comic-book movies, Arthur really was just a disturbed individual. Even when he put on his smeary clown makeup and red suit, he wasn’t a larger-than-life villain. He was an ordinary loser pretending to be a larger-than-life villain.
And yet … such was the movie’s black magic that this DIY Joker felt so much power coursing through him that in a strange way he kind of did become Joker. Was he a split personality or just a solitary sick one? The delectable answer is that he was both.
And that’s what we’re hungry to see the continuation of in “Folie à Deux”: Arthur the ordinary maniac who somehow, by embracing his identity as Joker, transcends who he is. The letdown of the movie is how little it makes us feel that. There are plenty of scenes with Arthur dressed as Joker, defending himself in the courtroom, singing this or that chestnut, sometimes in fantasy numbers that might almost be taking place in his head. But there’s no longer any danger to his presence. He’s not trying to kill someone, and he’s not leading a revolution. He’s just singing and (on occasion) dancing his way into his Joker daydream.
In “Joker,” after Arthur shot those three men on the subway, he ducked into a grungy public bathroom and did that wacked tai chi dance, which expressed his newfound power. He felt serene, discharged, reborn in his violence. At that moment, he became Joker.
A musical number can accomplish something similar. It’s there to lift ordinary characters aloft — to put them (and us) in touch with the force of their secret selves. In contemporary screen musicals, what we want to see more than ever — what we want to feel — is the characters taking an emotion and soaring with it. We want to see them transformed. In our era, the movie that rewrote the rules of that experience was “Moulin Rouge!” The beauty, the insolence, the aesthetic collisions (the fact that fin de siècle Paris dancers and bohemians were singing “Lady Marmalade” and “Your Song”) were all part of the transcendence. One felt a taste of the same rush in Lars von Trier’s feminine-sacrifice-meets-Björk musical “Dancer in the Dark.”
I’m not saying that every modern screen musical has to be like that. I enjoyed “Hairspray” and “Chicago” just fine. But the premise of “Joker: Folie à Deux” — that Arthur the killer clown and his paramour, Lee (who starts to think she’s Harley Quinn), will express who they are by becoming jukebox songbirds…sorry, but that’s not a Broadway concept. It’s an audacious concept. It’s one that demands an audacious execution. And for the most part, that doesn’t happen in “Folie à Deux.”
Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver, should have chosen a wilder array of songs. And the song choice you’d think would have pointed to that is the supreme needle drop in “Joker”: that snippet of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” as Joker danced down the West 167th Street Step Stairs. That might have been the greatest moment in the movie. It was the defining one. When Phillips announced that “Joker 2” was going to be a musical, isn’t it beyond obvious that that’s the scene that should have been the sequel’s guiding spirit?
There are a couple of sequences in “Folie à Deux” that hint at what the movie should have been: an edition of “The Joker and Harley Show” where the two, à la Sonny and Cher, sing the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” or the “Gonna Build a Mountain” gospel number, which Gaga sings the hell out of. For the most part, though, the songs in “Folie à Deux” don’t bust out and jolt us and make our eyes gleam. And they don’t make us swoon.
The casting of Lady Gaga certainly sounded promising, because she’s a great actor, and was put on earth (among other things) to make musicals. But Gaga, who has a lovely unforced presence in “Folie à Deux,” is drastically underused. Her Lee never quite takes wing. Gaga has a nice quiet moment singing “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” (Speaking of Burt Bacharach, why did Phillips waste one of his only choice musical selections, “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” on that opening cartoon?) But the number doesn’t build. Gaga never gets a chance to do what she did in “A Star Is Born”: seize the audience with her rapture.
I should mention that not enough happens in “Folie à Deux.” The movie is two hours and 18 minutes long, and here’s the entire plot:
Arthur is wasting away in Arkham State Hospital. He meets Lee, who devotes herself to him. He goes on trial, and the is-he-a-dual-personality-or-just-a-criminal debate unfolds. A verdict is reached. A fateful bomb explodes. The end.
As a critic, I’ve experienced my share of debates, but I have never understood the morally judgmental quality that hung over the criticisms of “Joker.” That the film invited us to have a deep identification with a twisted sociopath wasn’t, in my book, a weakness; it was a strength. (It’s for that same reason that I love “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Natural Born Killers.”) The movie was, among other things, an allegory of the Trump era, but it’s almost as if the critics were saying, “We don’t like the movie because Arthur is a nasty incel who leads an uprising just like Trump!” To me, the criticisms of “Joker” were sort of comparable to a studio executive giving notes that basically said, “Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’ isn’t likable enough.”
Did the critics, with “Joker,” turn into cautious executive scolds? In my opinion, they did. But the upshot is that Todd Phillips, making what I think is a huge mistake, listened to them. “Joker: Folie à Deux” may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but at heart it’s an overly cautious sequel. Phillips has made a movie in which Arthur really is just poor Arthur; he does nothing wrong and isn’t going to threaten anyone’s moral sensibilities. In fact, he actually blows the only good thing that ever happened to him — winning the love of Lee’s Harley Quinn — because he denies the Joker in himself. He’s now just a singing-and-dancing puppet clown living in his imagination. Is that entertainment? Audiences, I suspect, will still turn out in droves to see “Folie à Deux.” But when it comes to bold mainstream filmmaking, it’s the scolds who are having the last laugh.
