If you haven't seen Joker then now is the time to turn back. If you'd like to check out my spoiler-free review you can find it here, otherwise, scroll down past the spoiler for spoilers.
Well if you've made it past my crappy pun, that hopefully means by now you've seen Joker, so let's get into it.
The Good
I'll start with things I thought the film did particularly well. Firstly, as brilliant as Joaquin Phoenix was as Arthur Fleck, seeing him finally embody the Joker was so incredibly satisfying. Thanks to the build up to the final act, we completely understand why he's doing what he's doing and it's so effective. The whole scene was well structured, although I will come to my issues with it shortly. The scene is particularly reminiscent of a scene in The Dark Knight Returns (Written by Frank Miller), in which the Joker attends a chat show and ends up killing everyone in the room with toxic gas. If anything, this version decided to tone this scene down somewhat (probably because having our down to earth anti-hero suddenly unleash toxic gas would be a bit out of place here), and yet it is no less effective.
Seeing him plan out his visit, preparing by copying the actions of a previous guest and rehearsing his conversation, was a very nice touch. As much as he embraces chaos, he knows how he wants this to go, and he is determined to remain in control. When he actually appears on the show he is very much in control. It doesn't quite as he expected and his plan evolves as the show goes on, away from giving them the satisfaction of his own death, instead giving Murray Franklin (De Niro) what he deserves. And part of me was completely on his side here. Franklin clearly only had him on to mock him.
I also liked some smaller details in the film. When attending the stand-up comedy show to take notes on the other comedians, Arthur is always out of sync with the audience. When they're laughing he's taking notes, and when the room is quietly anticipating a punch line, Phoenix's chilling laugh penetrates the quiet crowd. It's a minor detail, and one that I'm sure many people picked up on, but I thought it worked so nicely as a means to show the separation between him and the rest of the world. Better yet, he never once looks ashamed at laughing at the wrong time. He isn't trying to fit in. He's so alienated that he literally has to take notes on what is funny and what isn't. What few seconds I got to scan those pages was incredibly revealing of his character. His assumption that jokes about sex will always appeal to audiences, just because one did, for example is very telling of his character. He says the rest of the world as very one-dimensional.
The last bit I wanted to bring up that I really liked was the moment shortly after Fleck kills his old workmate. At the start of the scene I noticed him pull the lock over, so had worked out he was probably going to kill the big guy, but from that moment I knew that Gary, the dwarf character, wouldn't be able to escape. From that moment I spent the whole scene completely on edge about whether he would also take him down too. I think Leigh Gill who played Gary did an amazing job of conveying firstly the fear and shock of seeing one of his best friends murdered, and then even more so the vulnerability which followed. Cowering behind a stool, slowly edging past his friends corpse and then that final moment where he turns to Arthur to ask if he can leave. I'm sure, based on this performance, that Leigh Gill knows how it feels to be in a position of vulnerability and he channeled that feeling into the role brilliantly.
The Bad
I want to talk about some of the things I didn't like now. Just a few quick things to mention before we get into my problems with the final act. Firstly I felt the reveal that Fleck's relationship with his next door neighbor was a little overdone. This isn't a film made for kids and I think for most it's fairly obvious from what we see in the scene, that we don't then need to be re-shown clips from the film but with her removed. She says something along the lines of 'You're name's Arthur, right?', as well as something else that gave it away which I can't quite remember. I'd had my suspicions that this was the case anyway, although I don't know whether that's true for everyone. I liked that it foreshadowed the reveal, which I think it did very well (her apparent enjoyment of his comedy routine despite it's obvious awfulness, the slowed down and heavily idealised first kiss scene in the apartment hallway, in which she opens the door ridiculously fast, as well as the obvious question of "well, why the hell is she with him anyway?"). Since it did all of this so effectively, I felt a little let down that it then felt the need to spoon-feed me with the reveal.
Now to move back onto the final act to bring up some points which I didn't think worked quite as well. Firstly about De Niro's character. At times I felt he didn't seem particularly realistic. Firstly to be so outwardly cruel towards Fleck, for little apparent reason. He's apparently a very popular talk show host, and yet he never seemed to me to have any actual appeal as a host. Obviously we only see select moments from his show throughout the film, and it could be argued we see them through the eyes of our main character, but I'm not sure it particularly works. He was so obviously just a bully that it feels disingenuous. It's OK to have some characters in a story which are slightly caricature-ish, but when that character is supposed to provide the emotional climax of the film, it seems to rob the audience somewhat of any real tension towards the end. We all know he's going to get his comeuppance in the end. I think if the host had been just slightly more realistic and I could believe that people in this world could ever like him, then I would have been more surprised by, and more affected by, the outcome. Maybe it shouldn't necessarily be a glorious ending for the Joker. He can still win and carry out his plan, but leave some wiggle room for moral ambiguity. We all know he's capable of killing. By this point he's already carried out at least five murders (and possibly 2 more, in his neighbor and her daughter), so just seeing him shoot another bully in the head didn't really give me much satisfaction.
The last thing I couldn't get past was how unrealistic it was that he would be able to get onto the show, acting how he was, and be allowed to continue. I understand that the film needs Fleck to be able to have his grand speech to the public about the way the world works, which I thought was very effectively written, but getting to that point felt sloppy. He'd never be allowed out wearing clown make-up when there's literally clowns killing people on the street. When he tells them he's murdered the three Wall Street guys, the audience gasps once and then seems to just shrug it off and they all let him continue. Even after he killed Murray, the cameras continued to roll on him for an insane amount of time. Fine that we need that scene to happen, but you could have it go differently and still work. If he'd pulled out the gun and was holding the room hostage, for example. I'm not pretending to be able to write a better screenplay but there must have been a better way to have done this. It works in something like The Dark Knight Returns, firstly because in that story, the whole audience already know who the Joker is so they know what to expect, but also because it's clearly a more cartoon-ish and comic book take on the story. When Joker spends the whole film setting up this developed and realistic version of Gotham, it doesn't work to me to just throw logic out the window for the sake of a climax which could have easily been done differently.
Anyway, that's a slightly longer post than I had intended but there were some things I wanted to say which obviously can't be said without completely ruining the film. I won't bother with closing remarks since I basically said all I wanted to say across these two posts, so thanks for reading.
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