Director – Todd Phillips – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 138m
****1/2
Get Happy… Get Ready for the Judgement Day! Prison movie, courtroom drama, musical… the new Joker movie is something of a wild card – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th
The big surprise about this sequel to Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), if indeed it is a sequel rather than another standalone film reimagining the same character, is not one but two big surprises. In no order of anything… One, it is a courtroom drama. Two, it is a musical. This is extraordinary. Less of a surprise is that, like its predecessor, it is also a character study. More of a surprise is that it completely breaks the mould as to what a comic book superhero – or, in this case, supervillain – movie might be.
Warner Bros. / DC appear to have unearthed a unique asset. DC Comics have a long tradition of alternate histories, something capitalised on in their Elseworlds imprint which have, for example, recast Batman on different occasions in as diverse roles as an historic American Civil War participant and a vampire. Thinking about such volumes in terms of the movies, such shifts of context as a musical built around a character like Joker makes perfect sense.
Right from the start, the film defies expectations, opening with an animated short Me and My Shadow all about Joker battling with his alter-ego, his shadow. The animation, put together by Sylvain Chomet, the animator behind Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003), The Illusionist (2010) and, perhaps more significantly, the deranged short The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1996), harks back to the anarchic Fleischer Brothers cartoons of the jazz age. The short never reaches its end, with the film suddenly morphing into live action.
Having said all that, the new film effectively starts where Joker left off. Having killed five people, – or, as he keeps reminding us, six including his mother – Arthur Fleck (Joachim Phoenix) is incarcerated in Arkham State Hospital where he’s treated brutally by his guards, chiefly Irish prison officer Sullivan (Brendan Gleason) who appears friendly one minute but has no hesitation about hitting Arthur on the back of the head if the latter reciprocates with a friendly pat on the back. These inmates need to be constantly reminded who’s boss.
The section of the hospital in which Arthur is held is the maximum security wing. Sullivan and the others often ask the taciturn Arthur, as they take him out of his cell to the exercise yard, if he has a joke for them today.
Arthur is the model prisoner: he has meetings with his sympathetic lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) who is to represent him in his upcoming trial. Officer Sullivan has such faith in him that he arranges for Arthur to go to a singing workshop in the non-security part of the prison. An earlier walk past the workshop with the Officer has already allowed Arthur to glimpse one of the participants, admirer Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), and in his visits to the workshop, they talk, and a romance ensues. DC admirers will know her to be DC villain Harley Quinn.
However, taking its cues from Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005) – a film as much about Bruce Wayne as it is about Batman – and, obviously, Joker – a film as much about Arthur Fleck as it is about Joker – this is more about Harleen Quinzel than it is about Harley Quinn, even though she at one point climbs the courtroom steps in a costume that might be that of her supervillain.
There are other notable characters, among them prosecuting attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), whose name will be familiar to Batman fans, a memorable turn from Steve Coogan, a distinctive judge (Bill Smitrovich), along with various characters returning from Joker, notably single parent neighbour Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) and work colleague and dwarf Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill). There is also a degree of pyrotechnic mayhem, although perhaps less than you might expect.
Joker always had a touch of the Scorseses about it – the New York psychotic of Taxi Driver (1976), the equally deranged talk show host of The King of Comedy (1982) – and the new film riffs (definitely the right word to use in discussing a film that’s a musical) on those two sources, reminding us that Arthur would love to be (and is probably capable of being) a TV stand-up comic or presenter and showing Harleen putting two fingers to her head and blowing breath out of her cheeks in mock Russian roulette suicide, an unmistakable reference to Travis Bickle’s similar gesture in Taxi Driver.
Yet, because both Arthur and Harleen sing, the piece feels like a rough, urban Scorsese crime movie (or a Phillips Joker movie) which periodically slips towards then erupts into a musical, the modern malaise variety recalling not Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977) but rather West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, 1961; Steven Spielberg, 2021), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) and, particularly, Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000). Except that, the songs here aren’t original: they’re standards pilfered from pop music and musicals, among them What the World Needs Now is Love, For Once in My Life, Close to You and the gospel-tinged Get Happy.
If you watch a lot of musicals and listen to old pop songs, you’ll know this material; For those who don’t, these numbers will exist on the edge of your consciousness. I suspect many will want to familiarise themselves with playlists of these numbers after seeing the film, and then go back and see it again; a sort of box office feedback loop likely to make Warner Bros. a considerable amount of money.
However, it must be said, the movie works extremely hard and smart to coin that money. It juxtaposes the malaise of mental health issues with escapism, jumping from drab prison, hospital and courtroom interiors to colourful sets recalling the most arresting designs of Hollywood musicals, erupting into big, fantasy dance numbers. Yet what stays with you is not the larger than life, visual set pieces so much as the half-remembered song lyrics, quietly uttered in a state of despair. Forget your troubles… Come on… Get Happy.
Joker: Folie à Deux is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 4th.
Trailer: