The degree of success achieved by Todd Phillips’ Joker in 2019 took me by surprise. As a dyed in the wool Batman fan, the idea of a Joker solo movies—depicting the character’s Elseworlds-ass origins without Batman’s involvement—seemed anathema. It also felt incredibly edgelord, setting the movie in a Scorsese-inspired 1970s version of Gotham, overtaken by crime and corruption on a grandiose scale. I honestly felt like the Joker was the absolute wrong character to make a Rorschach-style psychopath for the people. But the movie came out, it made a ton of money, it won some Oscars, and now the sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux is upon us.
Director Phillips said the main reason—aside from the original’s box office—that he and star Joaquin Phoenix wanted to make a sequel is they both loved the character of Arthur Fleck so much. This is abundantly clear in Joker: Folie à Deux. If the first movie endeavored to make the audience sympathize with a mentally disturbed individual pushed to public violence by a horrible system, this one turns his life into a tragic semi-comic love story. The movie certainly contains heavy violence, but most of it is directed toward Arthur, not because of him. This somehow makes the movie more disturbing, not less.
The film opens two years after Arthur assassinated late night host Murray Franklin on live TV. He awaits trial in Arkham Asylum, which essentially acts as more of a prison than a mental health facility. The guards, including Brendan Gleeson’s cheerfully brutal leader, rough people up on the regular. Arthur’s defense attorney (Catherine Keener) is convinced she can play to a jury’s sympathies and claim mental illness. She believes she can make the case that “Joker” is a separate, distinct personality from Arthur and thus he needs psychiatric help, not prison.
And while Arthur himself seems somewhat resigned to this concept, a budding relationship with fellow patient Lee (Lady Gaga) might change things. She sees the “real” him, the Joker, and wants him to show the world. So the movie puts Arthur in a struggle between these two parts of himself. One, a jovial agent of chaos. The other, a sad, mentally disturbed man with a tough life. Which is the real him?
You’ve no doubt heard the big news that Joker: Folie à Deux is a musical. “Kind of,” as Todd Phillips is quick to say. Indeed, we have several musical numbers throughout. While the film always makes sure to show us these are Arthur’s fantasies, some of them simply act as parts of scenes. Others—far too few in my opinion—actually shift into more outright theatrical, clearly unrealistic musical numbers. I do appreciate Phoenix and Gaga’s singing live, with the orchestration added after the fact. Still, I feel like if the movie was going to go for musical numbers, it should have gone for broke.
Singing aside, I can’t help but feel that Phoenix spends most of the film doing little besides smoking. The man certainly knows how to smoke cigarettes, I’ll give him that. But Arthur feels much more like a passenger in this outing, a bystander to most of his own life. If the first movie was him finally taking a stand, this movie is him sitting back down for a while. What I said earlier about Phillips and Phoenix loving Arthur so much seems to have led to them completely letting the character off the hook. They pull their punches, metaphorically, when it comes to Arthur continuing down the path from the last movie.
The first movie made over a billion dollars, and a lot of the online discourse surrounded the messaging, or lack thereof. While it’s certainly a choice to have your clown-faced murderer inspire the disaffected poor people to acts of violence, the amount people looking at Arthur as some kind of hero seems to have worn on the filmmakers. Angry white men don’t need more reason to pick up arms, sad to say. To its credit, Joker: Folie à Deux contends with this ever so slightly. We live in even more of a society in this film than we did in the last one. Arthur was just an unwitting spark, a constantly duped and disappointed fool.
That said, I can’t sit here and pretend like Joker: Folie à Deux also isn’t an excellently well made movie with superb performances. Phoenix is perhaps less iconoclastic than he was in the last movie but he’s still captivating. Gaga doesn’t quite reach the mania that Harley Quinn ought to have but still packs a wallop where it counts. And Gleeson gives another career-best, equal parts terrifying and hilarious.
Neither Joker film is uplifting, but the people who got a perverse power fantasy out of the first one will likely feel disappointed by the sequel. There’s actually a weird element of Passion of the Christ to Joker: Folie à Deux. But with way more smoking. I’m not even entirely convinced the twisted love story aspect works the way they wanted it to.
I guess in the absolute value sense, I enjoyed Joker: Folie à Deux more than Joker. Neither made me feel good. I do wish this one had set itself apart more visually and tonally than the predecessor, but overall I liked the presentation quite a bit. But if you’re wondering who the movie is for, basically it’s for the people who made it. If you enjoy it too, all the better.
Joker: Folie à Deux opens wide October 4.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.