Joker: Folie a Deux

2024 IMAX

The one 2024 film that I have looked forward to with tingling fervor has been Joker: Folie a Deux, the sequel to the excellent 2019 film that rightly won Joaquin Phoenix his Oscar. When she’s not in her Mother Monster popstar persona, I find Lady Gaga a very interesting performer. She can really sing when she has serious music, and her acting is unpredictable and engaging. And if it weren’t enough to bring her into the project, director Todd Phillips made the film a quasi-musical with multiple homages to big movie musicals and the type of jazzy standards that Gaga famously performed with Tony Bennett.

As sad as I am to report that the film (which I saw in an advance IMAX screening last night) is a blunder and a disappointment, there is still an excitement for me in being surprised by a film—even if it’s a bad surprise. Nonetheless, I would have preferred the film I expected, because it was going to be amazing.

In one way, Folie a Deux is a good counterpoint to the unsurprisingly awful Megalopolis. Both films take big risks by forcibly combining genres, but the latter is fully committed to its craziness. Despite its title, Joker never completely embraces its folly.

Things throughout the film work, especially Gaga’s unhinged and inscrutable “Lee” (a version of the Batman villain Harley Quinn). The confusion around her motives, identity, and actions keeps her scenes on a rumbling low boil. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck/The Joker is well-performed as he sinks into a post-mania depressive stupor in prison. The choice of songs is perfect, showing up the dark undertones of these sugary ditties (“Sing Hallelujah, c’mon, get happy—get ready for the Judgment Day” or “The scene where the villain is mean: that’s entertainment” or “For once I can say, ‘this is mine; you can’t take it’”).

The trouble is that these things don’t ultimately string together on the strand of the prison-flick/courtroom-drama plot. Much of the music is sung in intentionally unprofessional tones by Arthur and Lee before blooming into a full fantasy sequence where they can let loose. Sad to say, listening to Lady Gaga sing weakly is not entertainment. The gamble Phillips takes in grounding so much of the music in the ‘real world’ doesn’t pan out, because as soon as we hear the fantasy, we instantly resent the amateur half of the performance. And, friends, none of these imagined musical numbers lasts very long or goes too far into the lavishness of MGM musical spectacles. Those moments where the dream hits the heights are few, but they are the moments that truly work.

And so, we have a case here of the great cinematic sin: not knowing what movie you’re making. This film picks up the strands of several different conceits and then drops them, never committing to a clear and holistic vision. This is especially clear in the third act, when the plot and characters stumble from one possibility to another without fulfilling any of them.

As soon as the director landed on the idea of the dark side of escapist musicals and the entertainment elements of the courts and the press, he inescapably set his movie with or against Hollywood’s exemplars of those ideas, most notably Chicago. That film fully immerses itself in the delusions of its protagonist, staging elaborate and unified musical fantasies. Folie a Deux goes about half the way, and this leaves it in a no-man’s-land of unclear artistic identity. There, it gets lodged in the mud and riddled with enemy fire.

I was never clear on why this sequel existed, let alone what its driving force was, and the erratic choices that fill the final act lay the film to rest with no dignity or resolution. You may reply that that is the entire point, but you’d be as misguided as whoever cast a foppish high schooler as Harvey Dent.

(Oh, and fair warning: all those images of the two dancing on stairs...not in the movie.)