Oscars: Joker

I’d love to have something to put Joker up against, but my schedule hasn’t allowed me to see another movie. Realistically, this movie deserves its own post. As a side note, this doesn’t bode well for the goal of seeing all of the Best Picture films.

It seemed an odd concept to me. An origin story for a comic book villain. I don’t know why. But it just seemed like I knew what I needed to know about the Joker. But then, I sat down and watched Tod Philip’s take on Gotham’s finest fiend.

The movie opens in what I can only guess is Gotham in the seventies amid an extended sanitation union strike. So right from the get-go, everything stinks, and tension is running high. We meet Arthur Fleck on a pretty rotten day. He’s a clown for hire, advertising a going out of business sale when a bunch of kids steal his sign. He pursues the kids but is rewarded with a broken sign and a beating.

Fleck is a man struggling to cope with depression, a condition where he expressed most emotions through laughing, and a bevy of other mental illnesses. If that wasn’t a lot to juggle, he is also his mother’s primary caregiver. His world is a lonely one. Most of his colleagues avoid him or openly ridicule him. His motives are frequently questioned and assumed to be sinister.

Not the powerhouse villain we’ve come to expect.

It’s still somewhat unusual to have a comic book movie make it into Best Picture Oscar contention. As Martin Scorsese’s commentary highlights, people assume the source material excludes them from being true cinema. All due respect, this film is 100% cinema. I’ll take that one further and argue that Joker is a better example of cinema than The Irishman.

While the setting is Gotham City, the future home of Batman, the film dives into a conversation on mental illness. Not in the soapbox kind of way. Instead, we get a first-person point of view of the effects of mental illness. We see and experience the things Arthur Fleck is. There are manifested delusions on screen. The movie’s soundtrack creates and releases the tension he’s experiencing. The audience gets access to snippets of his journal entries. We are, in effect, in his head.

And the commentary is not limited to Fleck’s behavior, but to the reaction of others to Fleck’s uncontrollable spasms and outbursts. In his journal, he writes, “The worst part of mental illness is people expecting you to behave like you don’t.” His caseworker is ambivalent about the multiple cries for help. His co-workers ridicule him and try to get him fired. Strangers are put off by him in some cases. In others, they are aggressive towards him.

How much of Fleck’s story is real and how much of it is the machinations of his illness, well I’m not sure. The pressure he feels when he is out in society is. But, on other moments, I keep going back and forth on. To get the answer to that question, I’d probably have to watch it at least one more time, if not twice. Making the Joker far more complicated than other iterations of the character.

And that’s true of other familiar characters. Particularly Thomas Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth. In Joker’s narrative, these men aren’t the saints we have believed them to be all these years. But then again, we’ve only seen them through Bruce Wayne’s lens. Philip’s subverted expectations with his treatment of the faithful butler and beloved father, leaving me to wonder what involvement both men had with Arthur’s mother, Penny. Was he calling back to Gaslight? Or was all of that in Fleck’s head? I’m not sure. There’s a lot of questions raised by this movie. Days later, I’m still puzzling over them.

Joaquin Phoenix has played eccentric characters and characters who suffer from mental illness before. But this performance blows them all out of the water. I’m not surprised he is the front runner for the Lead Actor category. I’ve read he’s been an aggressive campaigner this year, but I think the performance could have spoken for itself. And not because of the weight loss.

Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Philips gave us a Joker to beat all other Jokers. An extremely tough field to compete in. Some of what tipped Phoenix’s performance over the others is the storytelling and putting Arthur Fleck in the driver’s seat of the narrative. But there was a lot of heavy lifting on the actor’s part. I can’t think of anyone who would have suited the role better. So much so, I have to wonder if this part was written with Phoenix in mind.

All of that said, I think I’m going to put this one in the “Should be in contention for the win, but won’t” category. Jo March, The Joker, and Ken Miles walk into a bar…”We could have been somebody. We could have been contenders.” Funny, but frustrating.

The one ray of hope with Joker is that it is most likely going to take home a win for Lead Actor. In this, the film is a success for the comic book movies that are yet to come. Joker has picked up the torch from Black Panther and carried it that much further. So, perhaps by the time Black Panther’s sequel rolls out, the Academy’s playing field will be ready for it. And we won’t have any more directors distancing comic book, and graphic novel inspired movies from true cinema.

As Arthur Fleck would say, that’s life! Till next time, Nerd Girls.