☆½
Joker is a phony, a cheat, a fraud. It mimics – no, mocks –– legitimate films and tries to pass off their style and techniques as its own.
There is not a single scene, not one moment, in Joker that feels like life, not a single shot that carries even a whisper of humanity, rendering its committed central performance by Joaquin Phoenix meaningless. His Arthur Fleck begins the film as a crazy psychopath and ends the film as a crazy psychopath. No amount of forced, uncomfortable laughter makes this anything more than a shameless bid at an Oscar, one meant to legitimize comic-book films -- a form that needs no legitimization. Some comic-book movies have been wonderful, stunning, transcendent. Joker is none of those things.
In place of plot, Joker substitutes a grotesque, unforgivable exploitation of mental illness; a shockingly tone-deaf depiction (not an "exploration": Joker explores nothing) of mob violence; a cynical, depressing assumption that we understand its violent, depraved and grotesque world because we live in one. It's distressingly forgiving of misogyny and racism, and through all of it Joker thinks it is being "important."
Some will try to claim that Joker updates the despairing tone of '70s Scorsese into our world, but that's bull: Those movies boldly explored humanity that had been wounded by war, corruption, neglect and poverty. Joker is just a comic-book "origin" movie, one not even brave enough to look at its own fascination with violence and anger and come up with anything other than self-satisfaction.
There is not a single scene, not one moment, in Joker that feels like life, not a single shot that carries even a whisper of humanity, rendering its committed central performance by Joaquin Phoenix meaningless. His Arthur Fleck begins the film as a crazy psychopath and ends the film as a crazy psychopath. No amount of forced, uncomfortable laughter makes this anything more than a shameless bid at an Oscar, one meant to legitimize comic-book films -- a form that needs no legitimization. Some comic-book movies have been wonderful, stunning, transcendent. Joker is none of those things.
In place of plot, Joker substitutes a grotesque, unforgivable exploitation of mental illness; a shockingly tone-deaf depiction (not an "exploration": Joker explores nothing) of mob violence; a cynical, depressing assumption that we understand its violent, depraved and grotesque world because we live in one. It's distressingly forgiving of misogyny and racism, and through all of it Joker thinks it is being "important."
Some will try to claim that Joker updates the despairing tone of '70s Scorsese into our world, but that's bull: Those movies boldly explored humanity that had been wounded by war, corruption, neglect and poverty. Joker is just a comic-book "origin" movie, one not even brave enough to look at its own fascination with violence and anger and come up with anything other than self-satisfaction.
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