Joker: Folie à Deux Review: A Musical F You to Comic Book Movies

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Posted in: Joker, Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: Joker: Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux is a disaster and yet another failure from Warner Bros. and DC as they continue failing to adapt some of the most popular characters of all time.

Joker: Folie à Deux is empty, has absolutely nothing to say, does nothing with its premise, and wastes the time of every talented person who decided this was a project worth investing time into.

Director: Todd PhillipsSummary: Arthur Fleck is institutionalized at Arkham, awaiting trial for his crimes as Joker. While struggling with his dual identity, Arthur not only stumbles upon true love, but also finds the music that’s always been inside him.

Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures/ ™ & © DC Comics

Joker: Folie à Deux Is Dripping In Contempt For Its Source Material

Most people enjoyed the first Joker if the high review scores and even higher box office count were anything to go by. 2019 was a weird year at the box office in general, so those numbers were already kind of inflated. However, there was no denying that the film was a hit on a crucial level for most people. Warner Bros. probably would have insisted on a second film even if the reviews were terrible [looking at you, Venom], but in this case, you can understand what is going on in the minds of everyone involved. Even making the film a musical was taking a big swing, so they weren’t playing it safe. Then the title was released, and the concept of folie à deux and applying it specifically to the Joker and Harley dynamic sounded promising. All of the pieces were there for something interesting.

Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures/ ™ & © DC Comics

However, as more and more information about this film came out, it became apparent that director Todd Phillips did not like the fact that he was making a comic book movie. When the Christopher Nolan trilogy was being released, people had many conversations about whether Nolan even liked the characters or comics at all. The way Phillips sees these characters is nothing short of contempt. Everything about Joker: Folie à Deux screams that this film is above its own source material, and the source material is somehow beneath Phillips for even existing. He wanted to make a pseudo-musical courtroom drama with a character disconnected from reality who accidentally becomes a martyr for anarchism for some reason. That pitch apparently didn’t sell, and you can practically feel how annoyed he is that he has to paint the barest hints of DC over this original idea to make it marketable.

It’s evident in the deliberate way everything in the film is purposely trying to be anything but the source material. This Joker is barely the Joker, and he’s certainly no criminal mastermind. This version of Harley is named Lee because we can’t even have the name, and her story is butchered beyond repair. This is not the tragedy of a woman who is manipulated and abused by a terrible man who eventually fights her way out of that toxic relationship to reclaim her sense of self and identity. Lee has no identity outside of Arthur and is wasted in every sense of the word. More than half of her scenes are in non-diegetic musical moments that ultimately add nothing to the film.

Wasting Lady Gaga Should Be Criminal And We, The Jury, Find You Guilty

The musical elements must be spoken about because they add nothing to Joker: Folie à Deux. When we’re talking about musicals, there are dietetic and non-diegetic sounds. For example, in Chicago, the opening number Roxy sees of Velma performing All That Jazz on stage is dietetic because it is happening within the reality of the show. A non-diegetic scene would be any time Roxy goes into her fantasy world to see someone performing on a stage like When You’re Good To Mama, Cell Block Tango, or We Both Reached For The Gun. Those musical numbers do not take place within the reality of the world. This also happens when characters stop and sing their feelings; within the story’s context, someone isn’t singing, but we’re seeing a song.

Almost all of the musical numbers in Joker: Folie à Deux are non-diegetic, and Lady Gaga’s regulated to these small scenes where they somehow make one of the best vocalists of our generation sound terrible. There are some exceptions, but they are few and far between. And unlike the songs in Chicago, these don’t move the story along or tell us anything about the characters. They add nothing to the film. This was a movie that Phillips was touting as “if the inmates ran the asylum,” so having all of the musical elements be diegetic would work because they would feel strange and out of place. It would emphasize how Arthur’s fantasies are bleeding into reality. They could have him seeing the show tunes on the stage, but everyone else sees him flail around a room. As they are, the songs are just constant reminders of how much they are wasting Gaga and padding the already overly long runtime.

© 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise. (L to R) JOAQUIN PHOENIX as Arthur Fleck/Joker and LADY GAGA as Lee Quinzel in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

The cast is doing their damnest to make this mess of a script work, but the problem is that when you’re forced to say completely empty words, it tends to come across in your performance. Everything we see from Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux, we saw him do and win awards for in the first film. He doesn’t elevate the performance in any way, and as everyone hangs meaning that doesn’t exist on Arthur’s words, Phoenix has to struggle to make the performance meaningful, and it doesn’t work. Gaga is left with almost nothing to do aside from the musical scenes. They are trying to flip the script and make her the dominant one in the relationship, but it doesn’t work.  They keep dropping some of the most cliche and boring tropes on her character to the point that it’s a good thing she isn’t called Harley Quinn because Harley Quinn fans are going to take one look at Lee and say, “We don’t claim her.”

Joker: Folie à Deux Doesn’t Bother To Explore Or Explain Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t even do anything particularly interesting with the psychological concept the film is named after. It doesn’t come up in the movie; it’s never explored in depth, so it’s just there if you know what it is. If you have no idea what those words mean, then the entire subtitle of the film is rendered functionally useless. The script plays the idea of actual folie à deux occurring between characters. Still, it’s seen as inconsequential at best and rendered nearly comedic, considering it was important enough to be the film’s subtitle. This condition isn’t well known enough that you can expect audience members to know what it is via cultural osmosis.

The only thing that Joker: Folie à Deux manages to do well is the opening scene, which is a Looney Tunes-style animated scene. It’s well done, cute, and has something interesting to say about the character of the Joker, so for those few minutes, the film seems promising. However, the film opens with that scene for no reason, and it’s never addressed, not really, so it’s just a short film that doesn’t fit together with the rest of the movie instead of elevating the rest of the production. The ending, which won’t be spoiled here, will also make fans extremely angry. The implications behind it were more interesting than anything that happened in the previous two hours, though, which is the opposite of sticking the landing.

© 2024 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & © DC. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise/™ & © DC Comics. (L to R) LADY GAGA and JOAQUIN PHOENIX on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

Joker: Folie à Deuxdoesn’t work for many reasons, including its messy structure, poor pacing, and utterly empty story, which is being told by highly talented actors wasting their time. However, what makes the movie infuriating and lowers it to the level of contemptible is how much disdain Phillips and others involved with this production seem to have for the source material. We can argue about the merits of comic books as an art form until the sun goes down. However, this level of contempt and superiority is saturated into every single scene of this film as it frantically tells you all of the ways it isn’t like its source material.

It’s the “I’m not like other girls” of comic book movies. There is breaking down the source material into its base parts and rebuilding it into something new, and then there is believing those base parts aren’t worth your time. Joker: Folie à Deux is a disaster and yet another failure from Warner Bros. and DC as they continue failing to adapt some of the most popular characters of all time. At least The Penguin is all right.

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