Joker: Folie à Deux Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga Can’t Rescue a Flubbed-Experiment Sequel

In Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, everything you may have wished for the follow-up to be is chucked at the door. Opening with a shrewd Loony Tunes reprisal of the previous film’s (Joker, 2019) events, it also bodes the shadow personality of the protagonist. The sequel is a direct continuation of the story, picking up a few months after Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) has killed six people, gathering public attention especially after shooting Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) on national television.

Since then, Arthur has been put away in Arkham State Hospital. Inadvertently, his rant about the State dumping the underprivileged garnered him a massive fan following. The case becomes Gotham’s top priority, with state attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) baying for a death penalty. Arthur has relinquished life completely, going through the motions of the day with a hollowed-out self.  He has no interest even in the appeal of his own lawyer who hammers together a defence for him by attributing the slayings to extreme mental illness. She pleads that he stick to an admission of bipolar disorder. That’s the only way he can get some sort of pardon, she tells him. But he is indifferent, snubbing all efforts to probe his memory of the murders. The film shuttles between the Arkham asylum and Arthur’s trial proceedings. Arthur stays detached and amused as the interrogation against him considers even his journal entries as evidence for Dent’s claim that there’s no fragmentation between him and Joker. The two are contiguous. Phoenix’s long, empty stares, almost drilling into the other’s soul, is as searing and unforgettable as his disconcerting shifts in movement and voice modulation, especially when the actor unleashes himself fully in the second half’s courtroom scenes.

Throughout, you get a sense the storytelling wishes to go for broke yet it refrains itself. Occasional sparks of inventiveness, like the very opening sequence, are brushed aside by tame directions the narrative takes. The screenplay coasts on the previous movie’s blunt review of Arthur’s tortured psyche and the dismissal of his childhood trauma. In that way, Joker: Folie à Deux is constantly in two minds. Whenever scenes rim repetitiveness (the debate around the veracity of Arthur’s personality disorder drummed on endlessly just to refresh memory of his killings), it’s cue for the film to dish out its musical side. Early in the movie, a character says music balances the fractures within. An inmate at a different ward in the Arkham asylum, Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel (Lady Gaga), makes a quick, heady connection with Arthur through songs. She catalyses in a jaded, defeated Arthur a want to regain his lost personhood as well as to validate and reinforce her own violent streaks.

Phillips takes this to heart a tad too much, articulating the gulf between Arthur’s circumstances and his doomed desires for love in a raft of featureless sequences. While the music borrows from iconic American pop and jazz chartbusters including Frank Sinatra’s I’ve got the world on a string, Judy Garland’s Get Happy and The Jam’s That’s Entertainment, Phillips stages these fantastical interludes in the most banal manner. Most of them are bastardised versions of Broadway productions. The one that smoulders, literally and figuratively, is bandied out early in a failed prison break, where Lee’s unhinged impulses start to draw Arthur towards her. But these songs in a parallel dream space summarily halt the momentum, destabilising too many thrilling moments.

Neither exists any blazing chemistry between Phoenix and Gaga to make the impetuous, obsessive and damaged romance hold up a routine, star-crossed track. It’s the sort of love where Lee emphatically says she will “build a mountain” for Arthur. But Lee’s degree of obsession with him, her elaborate pursuit of him isn’t grounded enough. Phillips isn’t interested in adapting stories as they are in the original comic, doing his own freehand thing with it. But he also expects us to be informed of the history and texture of these characters. Otherwise, motivations may seem exaggerated and unconvincing. A darker underside to the love story also gets buried underneath the old-school fun and frolics. Lee fathoms a relationship with him as long as Arthur keeps the discrete myth of Joker alive. It’s this disruptive, anarchic cult which has lain itself as the crucible for people’s protest against the rotten system. The minute Arthur suggests Joker may just be a fantasy, she coldly retreats. This equation spills with gaslighting and toxic co-dependency but Joker: Folie à Deux sticks to the glossy surface. We get spare hints of the delusions that too through Arthur’s lawyer.

The film feels redundant and stale, traipsing around Arthur’s psyche in a constricted vocabulary. The grimness floats on recycled ideas of a traumatic childhood being why Arthur fabricates an alter ego to deal with the pain. Phillips and Scott Silver’s screenplay spins on the Arthur/Joker duality, squeezing thin the moral tension in an already slim plot. A playful character as this re-fits to a sober type in the hands of Phillips. Arthur’s mock-chuckles punctuate the moment, but the blurring tragicomic register feels forced. It’s as if we have to be reminded every now and then this is Joker lest we mix him with some stock battered prison inmate. How does Arthur view his own meteorically loaded position as a crusader? Is he a martyr or a monster? How much of the symbolic charge to his identity is vested with hunger for spectacle? Is he possibly discomfited by the legion of anti-establishment Jokers that swear by him? Phillips poses attractive questions without the panache to marshal them together into something brutally frank and unsettling. Beneath all the musical pizzazz, Joker: Folie à Deux can’t stow out its plainclothes storytelling, neither its script nor craft fortifying on glints of promise.