Movie review: 'Joker' sequel is a twisted, nasty little thing

If a “blockbuster” speaks to the times in which it’s made, then I guess 2019’s “Joker” — which grossed over a billion dollars worldwide — says something about our modern culture, depicting a world where everyone is angry all the time, and where that anger is so incoherent it leads to violence and despair.

Arriving in theaters five years later, the sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux” can perhaps be equally read as taking the temperature of our cultural moment. The anger is still there, and, if anything, has become more incoherent. Exhaustion and confusion have set in. Even the Joker can’t find a way to make our fractured world funny.

As “Folie à Deux” opens, Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) has been wasting away behind bars, awaiting trial. His antisocial acts have made him a pariah to polite society, but a hero to others on the fringe, primarily Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga).

It’s clear to anybody with eyes that what Lee is really attracted to is Arthur’s celebrity, but Arthur is so besotted that he actually begins to believe in romance. While being interviewed by a tabloid journalist on TV, he nuttily breaks into the old Rogers and Hart standard “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” his performance simultaneously creakily tuneless and deeply sincere.

The “Bewitched” scene is only one of many moments in “Folie à Deux” where characters burst into song. This is, in fact, a barely-disguised musical, using classic songs as vessels to allow these cracked characters to express their emotions.

Arthur doesn’t so much sing these songs as rasp them out in a gravelly whisper that will suddenly, unexpectedly bite — the tremulous voice that warbled “for once I can touch what my heart used to dream of” becomes a furious growl on the line “for once I have someone I know won’t desert me,” dripping with years of resentment. It’s not “pretty,” but it feels honest to the character, an antisocial loner living in his head.

Both Phoenix and Gaga commit to performing all their songs in this manner, forsaking vanity for emotional rawness — especially impressive from Gaga, who we all know can belt like a Broadway diva. (She gets to sing “That’s Life” over the end credits, as if to prove that the shaky little girl singing voice she used for the bulk of the movie was, in fact, an acting choice.)

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s camera focuses on Joaquin Phoenix with a fixed rigor, watching wheels of manic desperation turn inside his mind. Gaga gets similar attention, often playing scenes in long, unbroken takes that encourage us to lean in, listen closely and look for the smallest change in expression.

This stuff is magnetic — Phillips and Sher draw us into these characters like a tractor beam — but what’s it all in service of? Arthur Fleck isn’t really a character, he’s a collection of “pathetic incel” tropes, and both films ladle abuse on him to the degree that Phoenix isn’t so much playing the Joker as he’s playing Wyle E. Coyote, a guy whose schemes continuously blow up in his face and who manages to fall off a cliff every time he thinks he’s scaled a mountain. (The Looney Tunes connection is made explicit with an animated prologue where Arthur is tricked by his own “shadow self.”)

At the end of the day, both “Joker” movies are essentially about Phoenix — his charisma as an actor, his ability to hold the camera with his gaze. While he’s more than up to the challenge of keeping us locked in, it would be nice if there was a movie around him worthy of his charisma.

I’m not sure I can recommend “Folie à Deux,” and I don’t know that I can honestly say I “liked” it.

Like the first film, this is a dour, depressing movie intent on making you feel bad. Unlike the first movie, it doesn’t even offer you the “subversive” sensation of getting tricked into rooting for a murderer.

“Folie à Deux” strips this version of Joker completely bare, reveals him as a phony and a poser, and then kicks him when he’s at his lowest moment.

But I confess I haven’t been able to shake the movie since seeing it, because it’s so uncompromisingly the twisted, nasty little thing it wants to be. Todd Phillips certainly has the courage of his convictions — even if I’m not certain what those convictions are.

C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.