This Gotham is a place of grimy despair, extreme wealth disparity, and festering lawlessness, teetering on the brink of collapse. While this realistic depiction makes a place that’s typically fantastical seem familiar, it’s not just the recognizable setting that gives Joker its hyper-realism; it’s what it’s allegorically about that makes the movie so believable, timely, and worth talking about long after the credits roll. Joker is a period piece but it is undeniably about our own troubled, relentlessly violent time.
Joker’s setting (roughly 1981) not only allows the film to be a comic book version of classic Martin Scorsese or Sidney Lumet films, it also strips away the technology that nowadays would help catch such a madman sooner rather than later. This is a time when people smoked everywhere (including hospitals), security cameras and metal detectors weren’t ubiquitous, and no one wore seat belts while driving. Times were bad but they could get even worse. Joker the character acts as the symbolic match to that waiting dynamite.
Unnervingly played by Joaquin Phoenix, the mentally ill Arthur Fleck is a struggling, overlooked schlepp trapped on the margins of society. Arthur is a man who has never had a good break or happy day in his life. The less said about how and why Arthur embraces the Joker persona and finds his liberation and joyful empowerment the better — this is a film meant to be experienced with an open mind and sans spoilers — but suffice it to say this Joker is the end result of a society far too comfortable with its casual cruelties and lack of empathy. We create the monsters we deserve.
Joker is an indictment of a society’s collective disregard for the well-being of its citizens rather than necessarily critiquing any one type of individual or class. As much as you sympathize with their plight, Gotham’s downtrodden can be as callous and vicious as the rich and powerful. Arthur is at one point or another injured emotionally or physically by individuals at every level, as well as by the institutions they populate. If Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle called himself “God’s lonely man” then Arthur Fleck is certainly Gotham’s lonely man. Arthur is ultimately seeking human connection, something he tragically won’t find until he puts on a happy face and violently exposes the city’s own hypocrisies and inhumanity.
Joker the film may ask viewers to empathize with its central protagonist but it doesn’t ask us to forgive him for his increasingly evil choices. As many real-world parallels and inspirations can be uncomfortably drawn from Arthur’s descent into violent madness, the film still knows he’s deranged and not to be romanticized – merely understood.
The key to that careful calibration is not only Todd Phillips’ sharp direction and clear vision but also Joaquin Phoenix’s indelible performance. Arthur’s uncontrollable laughter looks as though it physically pains him; his body is rail-thin and battered, his misery is etched on his deeply creased face. He looks healthier and livelier — dare I say happier — as he transforms into Joker than he ever does as Arthur. Phoenix captures all these tiny nuances in Arthur and his interactions with others that reveal so much about this disturbed individual’s inner life.
The camerawork is often claustrophobically tight on Phoenix, who’s in nearly every scene, all of which adds to the film never making me feel like I was anywhere but in Arthur’s tortured headspace. As solid as Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz and Frances Conroy are in their small roles here, this is Phoenix’s film and he delivers a tour de force.
Considering the comic book Joker infamously once said he preferred his origin to be multiple choice, this movie wisely embraces the ambiguity of its title character, despite this seemingly being an origin story. Arthur’s increasingly unstable mental state is reflected in the film as things grow progressively more dreamlike — okay, nightmarish — and violent in the homestretch.
Phillips (along with co-screenwriter Scott Silver) designed a film that demands multiple viewings; one of Joker’s strengths is that anyone will be able to argue their side about what was real and what was imagined, and no one will be able to say another’s read of it is inaccurate. For a movie about one of fiction’s most unreliable narrators, we should expect nothing less.
