Credit where credit is due. Todd Phillips has followed up Joker, a film that made $1 billion and won two Oscars, with a work of unexpected eccentricity. He could easily have satisfied the studio accountants by pushing his anti-hero deeper into comic-book territory. Instead he has put together a musical that ends up disavowing unlovely beliefs held by the first film’s less stable fans.
We know it’s a musical because both Phillips and Lady Gaga, his star, have made a point of saying it isn’t. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is actually a musical,” Gaga said at the Venice premiere. “Music is used to give the characters a way to express what they need to say, because the scene and dialogue wasn’t enough.” So, yeah, a musical then.
Even if such a proposition didn’t quite work out it would surely be the right sort of failure. Maybe a gloriously camp Jailhouse Rock. As it happens, we have ended up with a drab affair that never gets properly started. Two years after the events in Joker, Arthur Fleck, again an angsty Joaquin Phoenix, is facing up to his delayed trial for murder.
His diligent lawyer, played by Catherine Keener, is committed to any wheeze that will frustrate the death penalty, but Arthur is more interested in grandstanding theatrical gestures. A passion for fellow inmate Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga) further distracts him from assembling a polite face for the jury.
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Any viewer could fairly approach the courtroom sequence expecting a throat-clearing exercise before the main action. Once that is over, Joker will surely get out to Gotham and spread more subversive mayhem. Not so. Most of the film is spent in and around the bench. Yet it is not a traditional courtroom drama. There are few surprise witnesses. Nobody produces a bloody dagger and yells: “Perhaps this will refresh your memory!” The Folie à Deux trial is too busy with empty chatter broken up by indifferently staged musical numbers.
Phillips does not appear to have settled on a consistent strategy for those sung interludes. Some are pure fantasy sequences, apparently taking place within the characters’ minds. Others find, in the more traditional Broadway fashion, Fleck or Lee running out of words and ascending into melody (much in the manner outlined by Gaga’s musical disavowal). The selections from the Great American Songbook – Get Happy, Smile, That’s Entertainment – could only be more obvious if we had ended with Joker bellowing My Way. Instead he gets an unearned mutter through Jacques Brel’s If You Go Away.
The chemistry between the two stars in the spoken sequences lacks fizz and becomes scarcely less inert when they burst into song. It doesn’t help that they are performing in different registers. Phoenix (who sang his own numbers in Walk the Line) does not lurk in the talkalong depths with Rex Harrison, but his just-getting-by sits uncomfortably beside Gaga’s triumphant bellow. It is hard to escape the suspicion that Phillips is attempting a mighty troll here. You don’t like it? See if I care.
That core relationship suffers from the perfunctory nature of the characters’ meet-cute. The two Joker films exist at a brave distance from the comic. Fair enough. But here we are expected to just know who Harley Quinn is (for Lee is she) and to construct this version’s backstory accordingly. It is taken as read that they are involved in codependent self-destruction. Approach as a Gotham innocent and you will surely be left largely confused by their sudden light-operatic obsession.
For all that, it remains encouraging to see a contemporary film-maker prepared to take these risks with such a valuable property. There is so much momentum behind the project that it could still make a significant profit. That would not be altogether a bad thing. More vainglorious, troll-adjacent swings for the fences, please.
Joker: Folie à Deux is in cinemas from Friday, October 4th
