In 2019, a year now separated from us by enough catastrophic global events to feel like a distant archaeological era, the film jokerwhether you like it or not (I certainly didn’t), was a big deal. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and later received eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, with star Joaquin Phoenix ultimately winning Best Actor for his performance as a mentally ill stand-up comic turned murderous clown. The film also became the subject of heated debate rather than a little hand-wringing. Would the portrayal of the comic book villain as the lonely, misunderstood victim of mistreatment by a vaguely defined “society” inspire copycat destruction? joker may have wavered uneasily in the balance between criticizing violence and promoting it, but fortunately its many admirers kept their enthusiasm confined to the box office, where the film grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, breaking the all-time record was broken. an R-rated movie.

Five years later, joker‘s director and co-writer Todd Phillips returns with a sequel that takes an unseen – and on paper, intriguing – new direction: our miserable antihero has become, above all, the all-singing, all-dancing protagonist in his own private musical. Much could be said about Phillips’ execution of that idea, most of which is legitimately negative. By any reasonable standard, this is a terrible film, too long, too self-serious and far too dramatically inert, a lamentable waste of the leads’ boundless dedication to even their most thinly written roles. But no one could accuse Joker: Folie à Deux from being merely a cash grab, lazily reusing the mood, themes, or plot structure of its predecessor.

There’s an admirable boldness in Phillips’ decision to cast a pop supernova as Lady Gaga opposite the darkly charismatic Phoenix, and then ask them both to sing, live-to-film, a jukebox musical soundtrack from more than a dozen well-known songs that range from 1940s Broadway standards (“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” from Friend Joey) to easy-listening pop from the 70s (‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters). Granted, the director fails to raise the bar he sets for himself – sometimes failing hard enough to scrape the skin off his legs from knee to ankle – but it’s fair to say that this film’s problems are few or have nothing to do with the attempted magic trick of its premise. It’s mostly the weirdness of that trick, and the stars’ doomed dedication to pulling it off, that pays off Joker: Folie à Deux even minimally watchable.

joker ended with Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck locked up in a mental institution, but seemingly on the verge of escaping to begin his career as Batman’s nemesis. Instead of, Folie à Deux finds Arthur still locked up in the inhumane Arkham State Hospital in Gotham City. After being found competent at a sanity hearing, Arthur is about to go on trial for the murders of five people, one of them on live television. (Since he confesses to more people than he probably should, the number is actually six if you count his mother.) Outside the filthy walls of the institute, he has become a folk hero to a certain bunch of clown-mask-sporting nihilists and a gossip magazine. bogeyman for the general public. But in the hospital, Arthur remains a pitiful loser, mocked by his fellow inmates and singled out for alternately kind and cruel treatment by an Irish prison guard (Brendan Gleeson).

Phillips’ desire to mess with the audience’s genre expectations is evident from the jump. The first thing the audience sees, after a vintage WB logo, is a short cartoon entitled ‘Me and My Shadow’, animated by the Triplets of Belleville filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in a style reminiscent of classic Looney Tunes. In it, Arthur’s shadow self emerges from his body to commit crimes that the real man is then blamed for. The cartoon’s plot is a literal representation of the defense that his sympathetic lawyer (Catherine Keener) will later use in court: Arthur, she believes, is the victim of dissociative identity disorder, a former abused child who becomes the Joker character has concocted as a way to vent his otherwise inaccessible anger. It’s not clear whether the film wants us to agree with her assessment or that of Gotham Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent (Industry‘s Harry Lawtey), who thinks Arthur is just a sociopath feigning mental illness to escape the consequences he deserves.

Meanwhile, Lee Quinzel (Gaga), an arsonist in Arkham’s minimum security wing, has a very different view of the Joker: she’s a groupie, having followed his crime spree in the news and obsessively watching a TV biopic about him re-examined. (Even fans who haven’t yet consumed the aggressive marketing will recognize her as the future Harley Quinn in no time.) When they’re placed in the same music therapy group—a place where upbeat sing-alongs are touted as a salutary counterpoint to the grimness of asylum life: Lee and Arthur immediately bond and soon develop their own, more twisted motives for breaking into song. When they’re together, or apart and thinking about each other, their internal monologues rise to the surface like ready-made classics from the American songbook. This despite the fact that Lee, in turn, does not seem to be a big fan of the musical genre. When the shelter shows the MGM classic The bandwagon One movie night, Lee is so bored that she sets the piano in the rec room on fire. Not nice The bandwagon should certainly be a red flag to any potential suitor, but Lee redeems her taste later, when the now-loving couple release a cover of the musical’s most enduring song, “That’s Entertainment.”

Joker: Folie à Deux is certainly not the first musical to posit the idea of ​​its song-and-dance sequences as the emanations of a delusional mind, but it has to be one of the musicals that hammers home that conceit the hardest. Scene after scene, often with barely a pause for dialogue in between, Lee, Arthur or both in unison can channel the intensity of an emotional moment by delivering a breathy version of some beloved pop hit. Invisible string orchestras can accompany these flights of fancy, just as they would in a Hollywood musical, but the secondary characters never join in and rarely seem to notice that a serenade is taking place. With rare exceptions (such as the rock-’em-sock-’em Gaga cover of “That’s Life” that plays under the end credits), most of the vocal performances are in Folie à Deux are deliberately disappointing in terms of virtuosity: they are hoarse, scratchy and in Phoenix’s case often half-spoken, more suited to a tipsy karaoke night than the Broadway stage.

Gaga has pointed out in interviews that neither she nor the character of Phoenix is ​​a professional entertainer, so why would they sing as one? It’s a fair point, as is a less polite one that she doesn’t make: that if she were to sing at full voice instead of reining in her usual vocal splendor, the contrast would place Phoenix’s adequate but limited baritone in unflattering relief . But what causes the songs, all irresistible toe-tappers, to start to fade into a dull wall of sound has less to do with the quality of the execution than with the non-stop onslaught of musical numbers and the slowness of the story in between. Other than building up internal emotions to the point that they have to express themselves in songs over and over again, very little happens in the music. Folie à Deux. Declared fit to stand trial, Arthur goes to court and is marched back to the gloom of his cell each night by the cruel guards. Some familiar characters from the first jokerincluding Zazie Beetz as Arthur’s former neighbor, show up to take the stand, and at one point a gruesome act of violence interrupts the proceedings. But the story’s forward movement is so minimal, and so punctuated by long stretches of musical stasis, that the result barely feels like a movie. It’s more of a work of art joker fanfic created not only by the credited screenwriters (Phillips and Scott Silver, who also co-wrote the 2019 film), but by Phoenix and Gaga themselves in what was apparently a collaborative project to revise the script in real time during shooting.

The fact that Folie à Deux has the self-referential quality of fan fiction, doesn’t necessarily mean it will sit well with reality joker fans, who will likely be scratching their heads over a sequel about a comic book supervillain that features virtually no fight scenes, a single car chase that ends about a minute after it begins, and barely a moment that could be classified as suspenseful. The most important question for the viewer to answer is not, “What will happen next?” but “Is this all happening in the real world, or just in their heads?” – an epistemological puzzle that in itself is not enough to sustain our energy for almost two hours and twenty minutes. Even more confusing is that all the time we spend inside the psyches of two deeply disturbed characters gives us little insight into their motivations. The pathetic Arthur Fleck remains, as I called him in my 2019 review of the film, a “poor little clown-wownsie,” while Gaga’s Lee is so underwritten that we’re left unsure until the end whether she’s a vulnerable fangirl or a heartless femme fatale. . If, as the lyrics to “That’s Entertainment” say, he is “the clown with his pants down,” is she simply “the skirt that gets him dirty”? To make Gaga’s character little more than a mirror reflecting the Joker back to himself (in alternately flattering and unflattering ways) is a real waste of this powerhouse, whose life experience as a stadium-filling superstar has given her no shortage of insight into the psychology of fame monsters.

Without spoiling the ending, it’s safe to say that Phillips seems to eliminate the chance of anyone begging for more. That’s probably a blessing for both the filmmaker and us, as this bleak, muddled, sentimental film seems like it was made by someone who has a grip on his characters and his audience. contempt.