Joker: Folie à Deux
A runaway success both commercially and with hard-nosed critics the world over, Todd Phillips’ Joker gave us a dark and disturbing psycho-drama that captured the embryonic origins of the DC Comics supervillain.
It won the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award and saw Joaquin Phoenix pick up a his third Best Actor Oscar for his haunting portrayal of a vulnerable Clown Prince of Crime.
Indeed, Joker was not your usual comic book movie. It was a tour de force in character study that stripped away any semblance of camp or caricature.
Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel much anticipated by fans of the comics and movies alike, manages to achieve the unthinkable, with Phillips delivering an even more obscure experience than his first offering.
Whereas Joker was a powerful drama with a magnificent central performance holding the film together, Folie à Deux is a more fanciful and deliberately uneven affair.
Part courtroom drama, part fantastical musical, Folie à Deux is as bipolar and manic as the Joker himself, and I guess that’s what makes it work in its own weird and grotesquely beguiling way.
The action sees Joker, aka Arthur Fleck, imprisoned and heavily medicated within the walls of Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial for multiple murders.
The painful drudgery of life inside Arkham is made just a little sweeter when Arthur meets fellow patient Harleen Quinzel, a hopeless dreamer who has become obsessed with Arthur and his dangerous alter ego.
While Arthur awaits his day in court, he is permitted to join the hospital’s music therapy group, and it’s in this creative setting that Arthur and Harleen’s relationship truly blossoms, and the pair embark on an wistful, lyrical romance that will see both break free of their mental and physical bonds.
And there really isn’t that much more to it than that. Some may feel it’s a little too sparse and simple for its own good. Others, though, will delight in the film’s anarchic duality as grim drama collides with fanciful musical numbers and ironic, banal comedy skits.
As you’d expect, Joaquin Phoenix cuts a commanding figure again as the stick-thin, eternally troubled and tortured Arthur Fleck. His devotion to the role is clear and cannot be faulted.
The excellent Lady GaGa is a superb addition to the story here, giving us a fragile songstress who has the potential to morph and mutate into a much more sinister and lethal entity.
If anything, Folie à Deux is Joker’s hangover. It’s the morning after the night before, as the consequences of Joker’s mayhem in the first movie make way for a musical hallucination, sprinkled with a little romance and a dash of violence.
If you enjoyed Joker, you’re sure to succumb to the fanciful and booming anarchy of Folie à Deux, and I get the feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of these brilliantly oddball lovebirds.
