Joker

JOKER   ***

Todd Phillips

2019

IDEA:  A man who works as a clown grows progressively more unhinged as he succumbs to his deteriorating mental state.

BLURB:  From its opening title card of the eponymous character lying beaten in an alleyway, Joker powerfully conjures a sense of seeping, viscous anomie. It permeates the air like a miasma, coating every graffiti- and garbage-strewn surface of the film’s squalid, 1980s-era New York-Gotham City. Choked by both super rats and social apathy, it’s a milieu whose urban decay matches its moral attrition, and its visceral expression of suffocating spiritual malaise is the best achievement of Joker. Phillips realizes this environment with such enveloping dysphoria, and with such a palpable feeling for how its rotted support systems can leave its most vulnerable inhabitants hopelessly adrift, that we buy how it could produce as deranged a symptom as Phoenix’s Fleck. Through unnerving sound design and constrictive shallow-focus photography – and, of course, through Phoenix’s rivetingly disquieting performance – Phillips proficiently submerges us in Fleck’s increasingly delusional, delirious psyche, intensifying the societal bleakness to convey how it might appear to someone whose sanity it’s helping corrode. It’s a minor triumph of framing psychology within a tangible cultural context; where Joker becomes muddled, ironically, is in how it tries (or doesn’t) to negotiate this verisimilitude with its comic origins. Phillips and Silver want the film to be a kind of etiology of this outsize super-villain, but by attempting to explain him through all-too real socioeconomic phenomena, they often end up compromising the legacy of the character or reducing the phenomena to easy, specious diagnostic causes. They explicitly evoke the chaos of our modern climate, and yet this Joker doesn’t really add up to the profile of a believable real-life maniac. Still, what the film lacks in nuance it makes up for in impact. It may not hold as refined sociological analysis, but in limning a queasily familiar milieu, it effectively suggests the curdled systemic conditions that allow madness to flourish.