Joker (2019)

I put this off for a bit in part because a fellow cinephile made it sound extra depressing. Then again, he had also said that No Country for Old Men was the most depressing film he'd seen, and I largely shrugged it off. Perhaps it was best to go in expecting the worst. And having seen several episodes of Gotham.

In early '80s Gotham City, when Bruce Wayne still has his parents but already seems sullen, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a professional clown of no repute, hopes in vain to move on to stand-up. Life has not been good to him or his mother (Frances Conroy) lately. Or ever, reportedly. As he deals with one hostile jerk after another (was Gotham ever not a hellhole?) -- including Bruce's father (Brett Cullen), to whom Arthur has a connection I never dreamed of -- he comes to see lethal violence and an extremely unorthodox sense of humor as coping mechanisms.

If you prefer the Joker to have a multiple-choice backstory, or if you just don't like the idea of this one, know that exactly what happens isn't fully clear, and not just with conflicting reports of the past. Whenever an event seems highly unlikely, especially if it works in Arthur's favor, you can bet he's imagining if not hallucinating it. Some viewers think nearly every scene is in his head as he sits in Arkham Asylum.

If you're reminded of The King of Comedy, that's no coincidence. I detect a couple nods to Taxi Driver as well. Robert De Niro even gets second billing as a late-night talk show host, whom Arthur initially reveres. (It's also probably no coincidence that Phoenix plays the show's most awkward guest, given what he did a decade earlier with David Letterman.) I should add that this is less of a comedy than TKoC. I'm accustomed to the Joker being mostly unfunny, but not never funny. I can't endorse the other comedians much better. How strange that writer-director Todd Phillips was previously known pretty much exclusively for comedies.

I understand the plot to be inspired partly by one of the most famous Batman stories, The Killing Joke, in which the Joker, recalling details of his own origin story, attempts to demonstrate how easy it is for an ordinary man to become like him after just one bad day. Here, however, the action takes place over more than one day, and we learn that Arthur's had it tough from early childhood, thanks to poverty, his mother's abusive boyfriends, and her not being all there herself. At the start of the movie, while not criminal or even unkind yet, he already has a considerable if unspecified mental disorder, the most obvious symptom of which is a tendency to laugh spontaneously without feeling amused. Many of these laughs look close to crying, as if to evoke the silent that influenced the Joker's creation, The Man Who Laughs. (The big difference is that Gwynplaine got people to laugh just with his permanent grin, whereas Arthur never wins more than nervous titters.) Imagine how bad that disorder must be for socializing with people who don't really know you yet.

While that timeline almost feels like cheating to me, I can appreciate that the Joker has never been easier to sympathize with. At no point do I see him as a true villain. His first killings are arguably justified, and his last that we know of, however unjustified, are at least restricted to personal grievances. That said, he is inspiring clown-masked protesters-cum-rioters who hate the whole upper class. I got my fill of that theme from The Dark Knight Rises, but Arthur doesn't really care about their cause.

This is the first R-rated DC Comics big-screen feature I've ever seen. There aren't a whole lot of violent moments, but the murders tend to involve quite a spatter. I suspect it was the occasional swearing that really made a PG-13 unacceptable. Also possibly the most cigarette smoke since Thank You for Smoking (which, incidentally, stars another Batman villain actor). No wonder Arthur's painfully skinny.

For all my concerns about Warner Bros. rarely knowing how to balance dark and light or bothering to try, I don't regret this film's existence. It's always interesting, at any rate. It may depart in certain ways from all prior depictions of the Joker (e.g., he appears much older than the future Batman), but fan theory holds that there have been multiple Jokers in the same universe, taking up the mantle in turns. And I think Phoenix merited the Oscar even more than Heath Ledger did.

Does that make him my favorite Joker? Hard to say. Arthur's not as classically campy as Jack Nicholson's Jack Napier, as creepy as Ledger's mystery man, or half as crafty as either, but he is more believable. Personally, I favor the animated guy voiced by Mark Hamill, but he doesn't lend himself readily to comparison.