Joker Folie à Deux review: It’s not a good film. But is it art?

The movie's critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are disastrous. Photo / Warner Bros

REVIEW

*Contains spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux

There’s very little to like about Joker: Folie à Deux. The movie’s way too long. Too relentlessly dull. Too much of a musical – sadly, not a good one.

It is not good. But it is art. And for that, it should be celebrated. Even while being wholeheartedly not recommended.

Joker: Folie à Deux is not a divisive film like its Oscar-winning, 2019 predecessor, Joker.

That movie split audiences. Nobody likes this movie. On the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the movie’s critic and audience scores are disastrous, sitting at 33% and 31% respectively.

So, what went wrong? Nothing.

It’s a turkey but director and co-writer Todd Phillips knew exactly what he was doing.

He executed it perfectly. Brilliantly, even. He set out to subvert expectations and make a statement. To pull the rug. Some people just want to watch the world burn. Phillips is obviously one of them.

Having glorified the character of Joker in the first film, he sought to show that his mad emperor had no clothes. The violently confident Joker is torn back to his feeble alter-ego Arthur Fleck and kicked repeatedly while he’s down.

After taking criticism that his understanding of mental illnesses was superficial and vague, Phillips even strips that away, having a psychiatrist say he finds no evidence of mental disorder in Fleck’s clearly sick mind.

And while Joker’s portrayal of a mental illness may not have been perfect, it got the job done. You sympathised with the bullied Fleck in Joker, you felt for him and pained with him as he struggled with the condition that saw him laughing uncontrollably in times of great and terrible stress. Perhaps, people should not have expected medical accuracy from a comic-book movie by the dude who made The Hangover.

But there are expectations from a sequel. It should be the same but better. Joker: Folie à Deux is different and worse.

Phillips’ creative vision was based on star Joaquin Phoenix’s dream that the movie be a Broadway musical. Based on the results we can safely call this a bad dream.

Its musical sequences are exhaustive and tedious. They signify Fleck’s mental breaks from reality and an opportune time to nip to the bathroom. Unlike popular musicals, these sequences are not fanciful and free, whisking you into fantasy atop a host of snappy catchy numbers. Instead, they are small and disinterested, sucking you into claustrophobic oppression with their purposefully ugly and repetitive renders of old show tunes and crooner classics.

Phoenix’s under-utilised co-star Lady Gaga, pop music’s former enfant terrible, can belt it out with the best of them but here she’s restricted to a thin, wavering hush that’s perpetually on the edge of breaking.

Lady Gaga can belt it out with the best of them but here she’s restricted to a thin, wavering hush. Photo / Warner Bros

All of which is by design. Halfway through the film, during one of its interminably tiresome duets, Joker turns to her and says, “I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that we’re not giving the people what they want.”.

Nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Do you get it yet? Are you in on the joke? Well, wait until you hear the punchline; Joker: Folie à Deux is a courtroom drama. Ba-dom-tish!

True art is an uncompromising expression of an artist’s imagination, emotion and conceptual ideas. It can be beautiful, ugly or mad. It can live up to expectations, rise above them or, yes, subvert them. It can challenge or comfort. It has no requirement to please. Rarely is true art given a US$200 million ($329m) budget. Perhaps Joker: Folie à Deux explains why.

But when compared to the sausage-factory production line of other comic-book movies, Joker: Folie à Deux is a gourmet meal of uncompromised artistic vision.

Phillips was given complete artistic control, free of studio interference and audience testing. Warner Bros. wanted another Oscar-winning, billion-dollar hit. Phillips wanted to create art.

Joker: Folie à Deux is a bad movie. It is not a “swing and a miss”. From a certain point of view, namely his own, Phillips hit a home run.

The joke was on us the whole time.

It turns out the true unhinged villain of these Joker movies is its creator. It’s certainly not its titular character which, in the closing seconds, is revealed to not even be the Joker at all. The two films take a combined four hours and 20 minutes to tell the origin story of a complete nobody. And that, you have to admit, is pretty funny.

It’s also Phillips’ entire point. These two films - and let’s face it, the disastrous box office results make a third highly improbable - are a meta fulfilment of the Joker’s manifesto. The movie’s an anarchic and nihilistic rejection of norms that relishes in how unlikeable - borderline unwatchable - it is.

As the credits finally roll on this boring, frustrating movie you can almost hear Phillips’ mocking laughter.

Turns out, the joke was on us the whole time.

Karl Puschmann is an entertainment columnist for the Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.