Give this to Joker: Folie à Deux: It’s a film of ideas.
The problem is that the ideas are mostly bad, starting with the decision, at once ill advised and inevitable, of sequelizing a pop cultural landmark whose seismic impact was bound up significantly in the element of surprise—a sense of subversive flourish worthy of its namesake. Whatever one thinks of the original Joker—and it’s hard not to have an opinion on a film that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and scored two Academy Awards while earning a billion dollars worldwide—you have to hand it to its creators for finding a way to simultaneously exploit and explode the cinematic zeitgeist. When the film hit theaters in the fall of 2019, Martin Scorsese was inveighing on op-ed pages against the scourge of superhero oversaturation—specifically the way that Marvel and its ilk were grinding down the mainstream audience’s ability to appreciate (or even accept) anything more challenging than slick, serialized, synergistic storytelling. Where other filmmakers were offended by Scorsese’s rhetoric, it almost seemed as if Joker were inspired by it. By grounding their story in a gritty (and distinctly analog) atmosphere of realism, lowering the narrative stakes away from a CGI’d global apocalypse to a tale of individual alienation, and—most crucially—borrowing their basic plot beats from Scorsese’s own The King of Comedy, the filmmakers didn’t so much cross the Rubicon as collapse it. Joker was striking and ferocious, and it had a real ace up its sleeve in Joaquin Phoenix, a performer with the ability to make the viewer meet him on his own uncompromising terms. By styling themselves as squatters in the DC Universe instead of caretakers, Todd Phillips and Co. were able to renovate its architecture just enough that the finished product resembled art more than intellectual property.
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Which is why it’s so grimly funny—and, in a very real way, deeply fascinating—that Joker: Folie à Deux plays, seemingly on purpose, as a repudiation of its predecessor, or at least as a critique of the media sensationalism that propelled it to a place of prominence. Before the first Joker hit theaters, it was the subject of endless op-eds theorizing about whether or not its portrait of the title character as a frail, friendless shut-in flailing through a series of personal and professional humiliations would turn it into a rallying cry for a certain strain of alienated masculinity. In IndieWire, David Ehrlich wrote that the film was “potentially toxic,” while on social media, various commentators voiced (and inflamed) anxieties that the film would channel a set of violent, inchoate impulses in its potential target audience. “Phillips’ film apparently lacks the nuance or sensitivity required of such a project in an age of rampant Reddit trollism,” wrote IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “Especially when it comes to superhero movies, which attract knives-out fanbases ready to go for the jugular.”
There’s no such thing as bad press, of course, and Joker benefited from the moral panic surrounding its release more than it suffered. (The surest way to drive people toward something that might theoretically be “bad” for them is to warn them to stay away.) At the same time, the reading of Phillips’s film as a bad-faith revenge fantasy—or, more floridly, an “incel training manual”—wasn’t totally off base insofar as the movie forced the viewer into a feeling of sympathetic complicity with a character whose desire to lash out at a corrupt and crumbling society was ultimately backed up by the carefully calibrated nightmarishness of his surroundings. By making his Joker a victim of child abuse suffering from various forms of mental illness, Phillips bypassed comic book stylization in favor of a loaded, borderline exploitative sociology, turning the character into a kind of grotesque guru—a holy fool speaking truth to power. When Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck told Robert De Niro’s glib talk show host, “You get what you fucking deserve” before plugging him in front of a live studio audience, the intended mordant ambiguity fell flat. It’s one thing to borrow from the likes of Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and David Fincher; it’s much more difficult to replicate their vertiginous synthesis between hallucinatory immersion and critical distance.
Folie à Deux is only superficially an attempt to continue the balancing act. It picks things up about two years after the events of Joker, which places the action against the same 1980s NYC backdrop—a gritty, lived-in version of Gotham City that’s historically contemporaneous with yet a million miles removed from Tim Burton’s neo-Expressionist urban landscape. Arthur is in custody at Arkham Asylum, awaiting trial on five counts of murder (which doesn’t include the smothering of his mother, a killing the cops don’t yet know about). His celebrity status among the inmate population is real but hardly a point of pride. “Tell us a joke, Arthur,” smirks the ward’s head guard (Brendan Gleeson), whose jocular treatment of his star prisoner barely veils a mean, authoritarian streak. These introductory scenes possess a squalid, institutional brutality that feels cribbed from Frederick Wiseman’s singularly intense and influential mental hospital exposé Titicut Follies, right down to the use of an off-key trombone as a prison yard soundtrack. The intent of all this production-designed oppressiveness is to make Arthur (and us) long for the colorful, cathartic anarchy of Joker’s climax and its vision of a city in flames.
Enter fetching pyromaniac Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who’s at Arkham for burning down her family’s apartment building in an act of attempted matricide. Arthur can relate to her mommy issues and is flattered by her apparent Joker fandom as well. “I saw that TV movie about you 20 times,” she tells him during a hallway meet-cute that kicks off their relationship as well as the idea that Folie à Deux is an old-fashioned yet newfangled musical—one whose production numbers exist in the lavish and shared psychic space of its crazy-in-love protagonists, à la Chicago, Dancer in the Dark, or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The conceit is that where neither character can carry a tune in real life, in their fantasies they transform into seasoned song-and-dance pros warbling their way through the Great American Songbook: Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Tom Jones, Stevie Wonder, Karen Carpenter, and more.
To be a little bit pretentious—which is allowed because, beginning with its title, this movie is nothing if not a little bit pretentious—Folie à Deux is mining a series of long-held views about the escapist aspects of movie musicals, namely, the way that they allow viewers to project themselves into an exuberant, idealized space that, as scholar Richard Dyer puts it, permits them a sense of “what Utopia would feel like.” This is potent stuff, conceptually speaking, and it ties into the series’ depiction of Arthur as a person who either struggles to express his desires or else unveils them unconsciously—for example, the condition that causes him to laugh when he’s nervous or threatened. The problem is that while Phillips is admirably up-front about his influences—including in a scene where Arthur and Lee attend a behind-bars screening of Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 classic The Band Wagon—he doesn’t have the craft to make the musical sequences work: not as camp, not as parody, and certainly not as a window into any kind of twisted, tragic psychopathology. Instead, the upshot is the grinding monotony of a decent premise, poorly executed.
Speaking of decent ideas, after establishing Arthur’s predicament—and the possible liberation symbolized by Lee—Folie à Deux decides to mash up its musical elements with another venerable Hollywood genre: the Sidney Lumet–style courtroom drama, with Arthur and his attorneys opting for a chancy, half-baked insanity defense. There’s plenty of potential in this basic setup, as well as in the predictable but satisfying development of Arthur becoming his own lawyer, leveraging his obvious guilt as a killer against the more complex—and cultish—rhetoric of his unofficial defenders in the court of public opinion. Throw in the very real feeling that the trial has been structured as a not-so-subtle referendum on the overheated reception of Joker itself—trotting out characters from the original film to rehash and relitigate certain plot points—and it would seem that Phillips is on solid ground. But the parade of clichéd speeches, surprise witnesses, and disbelieving reaction shots from the judge is more enervating than entertaining, as if everybody—the characters, the filmmakers, and even the audience—were simply being dragged through the motions. (For a better version of this exact same premise that gets at something about the thin line between egomania and insanity—and is also actually funny—try The Trial of Tim Heidecker.)
In light of Folie à Deux’s plodding pacing and shapeless design, it’s probably worth mentioning that the best scene in Joker—and for me, the one that vindicated its decision to move as far away as possible from its source material—was, paradoxically, the one that brought it right to the edge of the Batman myth: Arthur’s excursion to stately Wayne Manor, where he performed a slightly sinister but also surpassingly tender pantomime in front of a preteen Bruce Wayne. The balance here between desultory fan service and genuine invention has stuck with me in ways that the film’s more famous moments—like the Bernie Goetz–inspired subway massacre, or that Gary Glitter–scored staircase vamp—haven’t, maybe because it’s the only one that seemed to truly embrace the character’s roots and the endlessly regenerative possibilities therein. There’s a reason that the Joker has endured and thrived through so many different incarnations, and while it’s undeniably interesting to watch Phillips and Phoenix stretch and bend that iconography beyond recognition, it’s also sort of perverse and futile—like watching somebody try to distill and inflate something at the same time, ultimately winding up with something that’s somehow over the top and underwhelming.
It may be that the only way to reconcile the myriad shortcomings of Joker: Folie à Deux—which unfortunately extend to Phoenix’s strangely muted performance, and Gaga’s as well—is to subject it to the kind of clinical postmortem reserved for high-profile failures. Without getting too deep in the weeds with a comparison, the feeling I had watching Phillips and his collaborators fail to hit the marks they’d drawn for themselves was much closer to my reaction to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis than I ever would have guessed (even if Megalopolis, both in spite of itself and very much on purpose, is exponentially more entertaining). But while it’d be easy to simply place Folie à Deux in the pantheon of disappointing or misbegotten sequels and call it a day, its badness is so profound—and so clearly a by-product of thoughtful, discernible artistic ambitions—that dismissal doesn’t seem like the right response. There are plenty of joyless big-budget movies but few that explicitly adopt that joylessness as a subject. Perplexingly, the movie’s thesis—repeated in the dialogue several times by various characters—is that “there is no Joker,” a quasi-Zen koan that doesn’t so much contextualize Arthur’s aimless, unsatisfying dramatic arc as negate it and then transfer that sense of negation onto us.
In a strange twist that seemingly has less to do with clever screenwriting than with wayward filmmaking, Folie à Deux’s best scene is its last one—not because its morbid punch line is effective, but because it conveys a palpable feeling of relief that the movie and the Joker-verse are over. Usually, when a movie peaks in the final moments, it’s a sign that it works, whereas here it plays like an admission—whether tacit or accidental or something in between—that the whole thing was a mistake. In the end, Joker: Folie à Deux stares back at us with bewilderment that mutates into a barely perceptible but very real mask of resignation. To quote The Band Wagon: That’s entertainment. Whether that’s a statement or an existential question is up to you.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
