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A30 PEOPLE & ARTS
Saturday 5 OctOber 2019
Review: Funny how? In ‘Joker’

a villain turns ‘70s anti-hero

By JAKE COYLE nabe stand-up. In the also been better with simi-
AP Film Writer opening scene, he’s cak- larly broken souls in films like
An air of menace and a ing his face with makeup in “The Master” and “The Im-
cloud of controversy ac- front of a mirror. His smile al- migrant.”
company the arrival of ready has a plainly forced, In close-up, Phoenix’s smiles
Todd Phillips’ “Joker” like unnatural form. It’s the are ghastly. He chokes on
a thick perfume. That, in crooked outward manifes- his laughter. He’s been
itself, could be something tation of Arthur’s anguish. raised to smile through
to celebrate. Danger isn’t Laughter is the symptom of pain, tragically divorcing
a quality often found in the his heavily medicated dis- himself from expressing his
sanitized corporate-made turbia (“All I have is nega- emotions.
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Joaquin movies of today, least of tive thoughts,” he tells his “Joker” is driven not by any
Phoenix in a scene from “Joker,” in theaters on Oct. 4. all in the safe, fan-friendly social-services case work- outside force but the omi-
Associated Press
world of comic-book films. er), a product, we learn, nous sense of something
“Joker,” though, is a calcu- of a childhood of abuse. bad welling up in the un-
latedly combustible con- To those who look at him loved Arthur. Having won
coction, designed, like its strangely he hands a card our sympathy through end-
chaos-creating character, informing them that he less indignities, we begin to
to cause a stir. To provoke laughs inappropriately, like almost root for him to lash
and distort. I wish it was as a condition of Tourette’s. out. When he does, one
radical as it thinks it is. We are, immediately, in night on a nearly empty
Instead, “Joker” is a mes- a realm very far from the subway (a subterranean
merizing, misjudged at- spandexed world of super- gloom pervades the whole
tempt to marry the mad- hero movies. Where there is film), Arthur has, in a trou-
ness of a disturbed indi- usually superficial shine, in bling way, self-actualized.
vidual to today’s violent the human-sized, adult-ori- This is, of course, who he’s
and clownish times. It’s a ented “Joker” there is grit meant to be. And it’s that
shallow, under-examined and grime. It’s 1981 in Go- leap, from self-pity wal-
movie that renders the tham, but the fictional city lowing to wanton revenge
dark descent of a troubled has never been so unmis- meted out on a sick soci-
man with an operatic fer- takably New York, home ety, that has made “Joker”
vor. That this feels so famil- also to Scorsese’s Travis rightfully debated. Rather
iar, like the backstories of Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. than surround Arthur’s hor-
countless unhinged gun- Due to a strike, garbage rifying transformation with
men that so populate our has piled up on the side- context, alternatives or
tragedy-filled newspapers, walks. Reports of “super rays of light _ whether they
could be seen as a pow- rats” have hit the tabloids. fall on him or not _ “Joker”
erful and grim reflection of While twirling a sign on the simply hitches a ride on his
today. Since the film has sidewalk (“Everything Must freefall in mania.
already so stuck a nerve, Go”), Arthur is harassed by There’s a moment when
perhaps it is. But conjuring a group of teenagers and the film could have chart-
psychosis for the sake of a then beaten and mugged ed a different path toward
pre-determined origin sto- in a nearby alleyway. a deeper character study.
ry, make “Joker” feel cav- For Arthur, everything has Instead, it gets on with
alier and opportunistic. Its already gone. His life is piti- what needs to happen,
danger, really, is no deeper ful and unrelentingly bleak. the chaos necessary to un-
than a clown’s make-up. Athur lives with his mother lock, with a cold-blooded
The template of “Joker” (Frances Conroy). His tenu- smothering and point-blank
isn’t anything from the ous grip on employment shooting. Arthur’s pain and
comics (Phillips wrote the slips away when a gun, giv- psychosis has been offered
film with Scott Silver) but en to him by a coworker af- up, in the end, not to lead
a pair of Martin Scorsese ter the mugging, slides out to any understanding of his
films about twisted loners: of his pants while entertain- condition, but for its violent
“Taxi Driver” and “The King ing children at a hospital. release, and to link to the
of Comedy.” To make the Phoenix, among the finest required comic-book ar-
point, Phillips has cast Rob- actors working, is dramati- chitecture.
ert De Niro, the star of both cally thinner here, turning It’s a testament to the
of those films, as a late-night him sinewy and sinister. His potency of Phillips’ vision
host whose show Arthur face and movement holds that “Joker” has already
Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the movie together. It’s im- become such a talking
our Joker-to-be, dreams of possible to look away from point. Phillips and Phoe-
being on. Phillips, the mak- an actor so fully, so hyp- nix have made something
er of male comedies about notically throwing himself to reckon with, certainly,
clung-to adolescence into a character, even if and that alone makes it a
(“Road Trip,” “Old School,” there’s an acting-class self- bold exception in a frus-
“The Hangover”), has el- consciousness to the whole tratingly safe genre. But its
evated the Joker from DC production _ one surely in- biggest danger is in not il-
Comics villain to ‘70s-movie debted in spirit to Heath lustrating but catering to a
anti-hero. Ledger’s whole-body trans- world gone mad. You have
The Arthur we meet is a formation in “The Dark to ask, in the end, why so
clown-for-hire and a wan- Knight.” But Phoenix has serious?q