Review of Joker: Folie à Deux

It was an excellent 80-minute movie. The problem was that it was 138 minutes long. They tried to make it half drama, half musical, but the musical aspect mostly didn’t work, and seemed forced. That’s the  primary reason I think it’s getting such bad reviews. I watched in a nearly empty theater, and halfway through, during another pointless song and dance routine, two different groups walked out, leaving just two of us in the theater to watch the rest.

How did I survive? By pretending the musical sequences were just commercials, and so wait them out until we get back to the good stuff. During one of the musical numbers I actually scribbled some notes on a notepad for a story I’m writing.

I see what they tried to do with this movie, and it was a worthy attempt. If you look at great movies that had great sequels – The Godfather, Terminator, Alien, original Star Wars, and so on – the one thing all had in common is they brought in the best of the first movie plus something new. In this sequel, a primary “something new” they brought in were all the musical sequences – way too many of them. Some were real, while others took place only in the fantasy mind of Joker, i.e., Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix.

The sequel already had two new things. In the first movie, which I really liked, we got to know the sad-sack Arthur and his horrible life, and his descent into insanity. The movie had eleven Academy Award Nominations, and won two – Phoenix for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and, ironically, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score). The sequel almost entirely takes place in a prison asylum and in court, which was new, and Arthur’s terrible life continues there – those scenes I found interesting as he adjusted to his new life, along with the breakout courtroom scenes, where many of the surviving characters from the first movie were brought back to testify.

The other big addition is Lady Gaga as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, i.e., Harley Quinn. She was basically a Joker and musical groupie, and love interest. As a character, she was pretty good – the “Folie à Deux” from the title is French for “madness for two,” and she was quite mad with her obsession with and devotion to Joker. But she wasn’t as big a standout as the hyper-energized, bubbly Margot Robbie was in the role. However, overall, the strange prison romance between the two worked for the movie except when they went to the musical numbers – which was essentially every time. That’s why they hired Lady Gaga for the part! Imagine all the best scenes in your favorite movie, and in the middle of each one someone pulls out a blackboard and for three minutes scratches their fingernails across it. That’s what much of it was like.

Two of the musical sequences really worked, and if they’d dropped all the rest and went with these two standouts, it could have been a really nice movie. The first took place when Arthur and a group of prisoners and guards are watching the news on TV and District Attorney Harvey Dent says he’s going for the death penalty for Arthur. The prisoners and guards begin making fun of him. How does Arthur react? Out of the blue, he breaks into song, and in that situation, it was creepy and worked, reminiscent of the out-of-the-blue dancing scene in the first movie. The other took place in court, when Arthur has just had his whole imaginary world burst open and he’s at his lowest point, and a witness is saying he lives in an imaginary world. Arthur’s response? You guessed it, a great song and dance sequence in the courtroom that takes place entirely in Arthur’s imaginary world, showing what he wants to do. That might have been the best scene in the movie. Then the scene closes, and we’re back to poor Arthur drearily sitting in court, forced to hear more statements from witnesses.

If the movie had only stuck to drama, with those two sequences, it could have been a near-classic. However, there were two other problems.

First, if you take out the musical sequences, the movie would be rather short. But that’s easily fixed. There’s only one prisoner that Arthur really interacts with. Why not have him and Arthur concoct an escape plan (along with Harley Quinn) that almost works? Or something like that. Or, better still, they could use the extra time to resolve the courtroom letdown scene, which is the second problem.

That second problem is that there’s a big letdown in one of the last courtroom scenes that I can’t go into without spoiling the movie. The letdown only works if they either resolve it in the final third of the movie (which they didn’t), or by having a third Joker movie that resolves this letdown. That probably won’t happen now due to the lower ratings and ticket sales for this one.

This one ended with a rather downbeat resolution for Joker that could be the end . . . but it left it open for a possible third movie. From a cinematic point of view, imagine if they had done the original two Star Wars movies (now #4 and #5), and stopped. Then Luke’s final confrontation with Darth Vader would be in #5, “The Empire Strikes Back,” where he loses his hand, and at the end of the movie the bad guys are on top. All this is resolved in the sequel, “Return of the Jedi.” That type of resolution was needed in this movie, either in the final third, or in a third movie.

Overall, I don’t regret seeing this movie, but there’s nearly an hour of my life I’ll never get back. But now I can replay those musical numbers in my mind whenever I need to get to sleep.

1,669 total views, 6 views today