Off to the cinema to see the disappointingly bland Joker, a film that sets up a fight between The Joker and a little person but then pulls its punches and has The Joker let the little person go, which is a shame because I really wanted to see The Joker fight a little person. Who would win? The Joker is a criminal mastermind but the little person is a hard target. Who would win?
Because I'm a globetrotting man of the world I saw the film at the AMC Pacific Place in Hong Kong, because this week I'm in Hong Kong, and I wondered what it was like to see a film in Hong Kong, and Joker was on, and that's why. The other films were Gemini Man, which looks terrible, Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil, which has masses of posters in Hong Kong's MTR underground railway network but doesn't actually open until today, something about a shark, something about climbing.
Joker is a Cat IIB film, one step down from the no-holds-barred Cat III of Sex and Zen and Naked Killer infamy. Cat I is "suitable for all ages", Cat IIa is "not suitable for children", Cat IIb is "not suitable for young persons or children", and Cat III is "persons aged 18 or above only", e.g. visible pubic hair and graphic violence. Unlike Japan the Hong Kong censors don't have a problem with pubic hair.
And neither do I! I don't have a problem with pubic hair. I mean, it's embarrassing when you find pubic hairs on plates and tables etc, but I've never found it offensive in the same way that bogies or pant stains are offensive. Pubic hair isn't dirty, it's just embarrassing. That is what I think of pubic hair. For the record Joker does not have any pubic hair, e.g. the film does not have any pubic hair. The character probably does, or at least the version of The Joker in Joker probably does, because he's not the kind of person who shaves.
There was one trailer, for Terminator: Dark Fate, plus an advert for a recording of a live performance of All About Eve starring the lovely Gillian Anderson. The AMC's showing of Joker had Cantonese subtitles, which is fine if you imagine that the characters are hallucinating in Cantonese.
What is the AMC Pacific Place? It's a branch of the AMC cinema chain inside the Pacific Place shopping mall just outside Admiralty MTR in downtown Hong Kong island, sandwiched between the Peak Tram to the west and Wan Chai to the East. As with a lot of places in Hong Kong the air conditioning was on an overkill setting, but this suited the film fine. It was a midday screening and the theatre was about half-full.
Hong Kong is a little bit disappointing for cinemas. It has lots, but they're almost entirely mid-large multiplex types on account of the real estate prices and overcrowding. There's no room for quirky little cinemas along the lines of the Curzon Soho or The Gate in Notting Hill. The nearest equivalent is perhaps the Hong Kong Film Archive, but instead of showing John Woo marathons it has a much more conservative, highbrow programme that majors in vintage opera adaptations and black and white dramas from the 1950s.
The view left from the entrance, towards the Bank of China tower.
Joker is a bit like those superhero comics where Superman fights Muhammed Ali, or Superman fights Jackie Chan, or Batman fights Jackie Chan, or Superman fights Mike Tyson, or Superman fights Batman, etc, and for it to work Superman has to be stripped of his powers by aliens because otherwise he would win easily, and because he doesn't really dislike Jackie Chan or Batman or Mike Tyson etc the pair of them agree to stage the fight, and then they punch out the aliens who are holding them captive and escape. It's just a big tease. You want to see Superman fighting Muhammed Ali, but he never does. It's a cop-out.
Joker cops out as well, but it doesn't even cop out properly. The Joker doesn't fight the little person or team up with him or anything. The little person's character has a name, by the way, but I didn't catch it. Gary? Was it Gary? The Joker doesn't team up with the little person, he just lets him go. It was a tremendous disappointment.
What is Joker? It tells the story of how top comic book villain The Joker became The Joker. In real life The Joker is a highly-strung, mentally-ill man called Arthur Fleck, who works as a clown, but he's a terrible clown so he gets fired. Fleck is a nobody, a bum, a fuck-up, although he dreams of a career as a stand-up comedian and has visions of being on television and being a somebody and being respected and being hugged by Robert De Niro, who is a talk show host.
In theory I should identify with Arthur Fleck. He wants to be loved and respected by Robert De Niro, and isn't that what we all want? To be loved and respected by Robert De Niro. It's what I want, and we're not so different, you and I.
But imagine if Robert De Niro pretended to respect you but secretly despised you. Imagine if Robert De Niro mocked you on live television. You'd get mad, wouldn't you? You'd get angry. You'd want to make Robert De Niro shut up. And I mean although Fleck doesn't become The Joker until the end of the film, he's a wiry guy, so you'd expect him to beat the little person easily, but the little person looks pretty fit, and he's had a hard life, because the film is set in the very early 1980s, when it was still just about acceptable to call little people midgets or dwarves.
He's had a hard life, but so has Arthur Fleck, because he's an adoptee. Furthermore he was raised by a single mother, so it's no wonder he turned out bad. The odds were stacked against him from the start.
The thing about Joker is that it's thin. It's inconsequential. It has the form of a shocking, uncompromising character drama, but it pulls its punches. It's never truly offensive, unlike for example the preceding paragraph. It's essentially a watered-down mixture of Taxi Driver and Network, with a bit of Peter Sellers' Being There, but those films were much better. Much better. They weren't just stories, they had themes. They were about something. They were made in a decade when Hollywood films tried to be about something, tried to say something about the human condition. And because those films were made in the 1970s they could be offensive, dirty in an old-school way.
They still have elements that are shocking today. Remember when Travis Bickle starts ranting about junkies, punks, buggers, queens, and how sometimes he has to wash come off the back seat? The film doesn't punish him for calling people buggers and queens. The other characters in the film are disconcerted by his intensity, but the film just observes him.
Remember when Martin Scorsese (playing a taxi passenger) says that he's going to ram a .44 Magnum up a woman's front bottom and blow it to shreds? It wasn't clear if he was drunk, or if he meant it, but the film doesn't reprimand him. Taxi Driver observes its characters without passing judgement. Furthermore they're interesting characters, in a distinctive environment, and the script is good, and the storyline is interesting. It's not much to ask.
Joker is essentially two different films at once. There's a melodrama about how Arthur Fleck discovers his past, but that feels like a first draft of another film. He is led to believe that he is related to wealthy businessman and political candidate Thomas Wayne. Without wishing to spoil the plot, it's hard to tell if he is, because parts of Joker take place inside Fleck's head. They're waking dreams that he has. He imagines that he's dating a lady who lives down the hall, but it's obviously a fantasy. The film eventually feels the need to make Fleck's delusional state obvious, but it's not necessary; I'm not especially intelligent but I got the gist of it straightaway. Fleck obviously doesn't get any pussy.
The cinema is behind that black building off to the right.
Remember how Travis Bickle was simultaneously sympathetic and also deeply unappealing? A self-righteous twelve-year-old boy stuck in a young man's body, with a child's view of the world? Joker has many problems, but one of the most important is that Fleck is mentally ill. Not like Hannibal Lector - he's not an evil genius - and not like Howard Beale from Network, who was going through a mental breakdown but was lucid and coherent. Instead Fleck is barely functional. Throughout the film he rarely manages to string together more than two sentences.
He is more sinned against than sinning, but he isn't sympathetic, because his life doesn't seem to be all that bad, but at the same time he's not especially unappealing either. He doesn't torture cats or carve smiles into people's faces. He just lives at home with his mother. He's a little bit like Chance from Being There, but whereas that film was carefully constructed to illustrate a theme, Joker just dumps a half-formed character into a pastiche of the mean New York of the 1970s and 1980s. At times Joker feels like one of those BBC Plays for Today, in the sense that if you took away a couple of violent scenes it would be a drama about a mentally ill man failing to cope with the loss of his medication. Have you seen Scum? It's a British television movie from the early 1980s, directed by Alan Clark, infamous for its brutality and graphic violence. It was sensationalist but it got under my skin, whereas Joker has some nice cinematography but in a few weeks I'm not going to remember it, and I have no desire to ever watch it again.
Up the page I mentioned Being There. It's a classic film that tends to be overlooked nowadays. I have the impression it's thought of as a one-joke film with a blank slate for a main character, and furthermore the film's theme - that "what's inside doesn't matter" - was explored in more vivid fashion later in the 1980s by Bret Easton Ellis. Being There is about a mentally ill man played by Peter Sellers who works as a gardener in a grand house in a big city. I can't remember if it's Washington or New York. He's a empty vessel; he grew up watching television and has no internal life. He just has catchphrases, but in his favour he dresses well and is a white anglo-saxon man in an environment where political power is held by other anglo-saxon men. There's a famous series of photographs of Adolf Hitler preparing for one of his speeches. He swings his fists and punches the air for emphasis, because he knew that it didn't matter what you said, so long as you said it convincingly. In Being There Sellers' character manages to fool his audience accidentally, without trying; the audience sees a well-dressed, well-spoken man, and fools itself. By saying as little as possible and looking intelligent Sellers' character goes a long way.
I have a sense that Joker aspired to this kind of thing. Arthur Fleck practices his stage manner with video tapes of a chat show playing in the background, and is shown to be capable of imitating the superficial polish of an experienced chat show guest. The idea of The Joker as an imitation of a supervillain is fascinating, and a different and much better film could have done something with it, but Joker does very little with the idea. It's essentially a throwaway explanation for a key plot point, and as with the abortive fight against the little person it disappointed me. Joker seems to want to avoid dealing with anything or expressing a coherent opinion. Arthur Fleck is neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic; perhaps because the film-makers didn't want to portray a murdering sociopath as a hero he does nothing that anyone would want to copy, but conversely as the main character he doesn't do anything particularly bad - he mostly has things happen to him, or he reacts to imminent danger - and although his behaviour is occasionally cringe-worthy he doesn't come across as vile or unappealing. The people he kills are either unsympathetic or non-entities.
I mean, yes, technically Fleck stabs a man in the neck for no reason at all, but it comes out of nowhere and may or may not have been a dream sequence. It doesn't resonate emotionally, which is a general criticism I have of the film. Besides, haven't we all wanted to stab someone in the neck? I've spent twelve hours of my life on a flight from Heathrow to Hong Kong, I'm not going to criticise anyone for behaviour that might seem extreme in a different context. It's all about context. Society is contextual.
Two different films at once. Three different films. There's the melodrama, but that's rubbish. Even if Arthur Fleck is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, so what? It doesn't go anyway, it's just a detail. There's a variation of the poor-vs-rich theme running through Dark Knight Rises, but if anything Joker gives the idea less thought than the earlier film. In Dark Knight Rises it's obvious that the villainous Bane doesn't give a shit about the poor, he's just a fascist using them for his own personal aggrandisement, but Joker doesn't even have that depth. The film has come in for a certain amount of criticism for suggesting that the upper classes should not have a monopoly on the use of force, but all of that happens in the background. One of Fleck's crimes triggers off a wave of anti-yuppie sentiment, but it didn't resonate emotionally because it happens offscreen. Fleck himself lives in a bubble and appeals to be unaware of the riots and demonstrations going on in the background (furthermore the film doesn't show them until the very end, so they don't feel real).
Three films. Joker is in theory also a standard comic book film. It's an origin story of The Joker, who is the most famous adversary of masked vigilante Batman. In the Batman stories - whether in films or cartoons or comics or whatever - The Joker masterminds a series a brilliant crimes, and then Batman catches him and puts him in Arkham Asylum, but he escapes and the cycle continues. Depending on the writer and the decade and the publication The Joker is either a fundamentally harmless bank robber who uses motorised teeth as a distraction and knocks people out with smile gas, or alternatively he's a depraved child murderer who mutilates his victims, or he exists between those two poles. The key thing is that he's competent. He's not superhuman, or even particularly strong, so he has to be smart. He's ruthless and good with a knife, and he has a devilish charisma that inspires people to follow him.
Arthur Fleck on the other hand isn't competent, or charismatic. He's not even on the lucky-idiot level of someone like Ted Bundy. He makes no attempt to cover up his early killings, and the only murder he pre-plans is ludicrous and leaves him with no escape route. Again, yet again, a film about a Bundy-like serial killer who slips through the cracks accidentally might have worked - it was essentially how American Psycho's Patrick Bateman got away with his crimes - albeit that it's hard to imagine a man in clown makeup avoiding police attention for very long, so perhaps I shouldn't criticise the film in that respect. I mention how the Joker's final crime is ridiculous. The film generally takes place in the same gritty world as The Wire or Goodfellas or one of those gangster films, but towards the end Joker's air of verisimilitude breaks down. I don't want to spoil things, but the ease with which Fleck delivers the punchline of his final joke stretches credibility. As a villain Fleck comes across as completely inept. Again, again there is one point in the film where Fleck seems to do something clever - he hides in a train full of people wearing clown masks - but it's over in a flash and it's just an accident.
Perhaps the idea is that Arthur Fleck doesn't become a criminal mastermind until he has spent several years after the events of Joker inside Arkham Asylum, learning his trade, but the film doesn't show that he's capable of learning from experience or that he has any hidden talents, so if that's the idea it's far too ephemeral. Of note the film seems to take place in a version of the Batman universe, but the timeline is such that it's unlikely this Joker would ever co-exist with Batman. Fleck appears to be in his late forties, but Bruce Wayne is a little boy; perhaps the idea is that The Joker eventually becomes a white collar criminal mastermind rather than a direct physical threat to Batman.
Ultimately the problem with Joker is that the film didn't engage me. Arthur Fleck is a pathetic figure who doesn't have a coherent philosophy. As a crook he would be useless, and yet the film implies that this is just the beginning of his story. The mass movement he inspires takes place offscreen. The melodrama involving his parentage is a dead end. A late revelation that Fleck is partially responsible for a key element of the Batman mythos made me think "so what". Given his mental problems it's hard to blame him for his actions, and the film's nod to social satire is clumsy. Fleck goes off the rails when his medications are cut by the government, but he's already a deranged lunatic at the beginning of the film so yet again Joker goes out of its way to avoid saying anything.
On a purely visceral, Death Wish level a couple of the kills are pretty good. Fleck stabs a guy in the neck and then smashes his head against a wall leaving blood everywhere. It's fantastic, but it's not enough to redeem the rest of the film. There are three laughs, two of which are guilty laughs, plus a couple of good shots. Ultimately the film feels like a great big nothing, a lot of pretend angst masking a boring story. It's a revival of the kind of New-York-Welcome-to-Fear-City films that came out in the 1970s, but this New York doesn't even appear particularly sordid (and bear in mind that I've just spent a week in Kowloon, which has more poverty than New York in the 1970s but a far smaller crime rate).
Despite being a film for grown-ups Joker is surprisingly prudish in the modern style. There's almost no swearing; no nudity; no perversion; the people who are mean to the little person are shown to be assholes; the yuppies that Fleck kills don't do anything particularly bad. There are no prostitutes and Fleck doesn't go to a strip club. He doesn't sadistically torture anyone or strip the flesh off their face or anything.
Couldn't they at least have made him a clown butcher? Butcher by day, clown by night, or vice-versa? I would pay to see that film. Butcher Clown, the script writes itself. Shoot it on the shittest 35mm off-cuts available, mono soundtrack, dub it to videotape, then dub that tape to a second tape so that all the neon blues and reds go fuzzy, then get voiceover people to loop the dialogue, have it released to VHS on a label you've never heard of, bingo. Couldn't they at least have had one scene where Fleck holds a person at gunpoint, wearing clown makeup, while shouting "DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING CLOWN TO YOU? IS THIS A JOKE?", only it's so brutal that you dare not laugh? This is another one of those films where I spent the second half wondering if I could have written a better script myself.
Would Joker have been better if it had been made in the 1970s, when you could use the N-word and say the F-for-homosexual word and have a white hero threaten to blow a black man's head clean off and it was supposed to be awesome? When you could have main characters who were unappealing assholes, but they weren't punished for it? It would essentially be Dirty Harry, but told from the point of view of the Scorpio killer, and there would be no Dirty Harry. Imagine if the film had been made in the 1970s with Jack Nicholson - sweary Jack Nicholson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Last Detail and The Shining. Or Dennis Hopper. Or Dustin Hoffman. Or Gene Hackman. Alas the moment has passed.
Anything else? The film also has an overt reference to Bob Monkhouse. Arthur Fleck tries his hand at stand up comedy. It doesn't go well but to his credit he manages two decent jokes. The second one is a Bob Monkhouse joke. I realise the joke is old as the hills, but some comedians become so associated with certain jokes that they own the joke, and Bob Monkhouse owns that joke. Wherever you are, Bob, I thought of you.
Oh yes, the performances. Joe-a-quim Phoenix is Arthur Fleck. He has a bunch of mannerisms and isn't afraid to be embarrassing, but as mentioned earlier I felt nothing for the character so his performance was wasted. He's like Forrest Gump without the charisma, a nobody. A mostly passive moron whose revenge against the people who wronged him feels arbitrary and unsatisfying. I wanted to cheer him on as he stabbed and tortured fat businessmen and policemen and pimps and yuppies and the media and so on, but the film doesn't want anything to do with that sort of thing in case it inspires copycats.
None of the other actors stood out. Robert De Niro has an extended cameo as a talk show host, but throughout the film he puts on a performance as a talk show host, so it's hard to evaluate his actual performance. Does that make sense? We never see the character that De Niro plays when he's off screen so he's just a broad parody of a talk show host. At one point an interview he conducts goes off the rails. A different film might have had something to say about the contrast between the squeaky-clean, reassuring world of light entertainment and the actual world of brutal violence and sudden death. An obvious theme, and perhaps to its credit the film skirts around it; De Niro's character obviously senses that he has a scoop on live television, but instead of panicking he tries to dig out the story. It's one of the few parts of Joker that feels genuinely smart - Johnny Carson or Michael Parkinson would have done the same thing, in the same situation - but also frustrating because it's just one smart element amongst a sea of blandness. Echoes of ideas. That's what Joker feels like. Imitations of ideas. Echoes of ideas. Sound divorced from the original movement.
Technical stuff? The music is pretty good. Literal. Wonky cellos and strings as if to suggest that Arthur Fleck is unhinged. The cinematography is standard mid-2010s digital, with everything shot at f/1.4 and the colours are pastel and there's lens flare. It uses "the film look", which ironically doesn't look like film, so on a visual level it has very little in common with Dog Day Afternoon or Serpico or Wolfen or The Warriors etc. It uses a modern trick whereby some scenes start off with camera rock steady, and then it cuts to the exact same shot but suddenly its hand-held and wobbly. There's probably a name for it. Selective stabilisation. Stabilisation ramping. I don't know. Ask David Mullen on Cinematographers.net, he probably knows. Someone is bound to point out in the comments that it was actually shot with film, in which case my argument is that the film has been scanned into Adobe Premiere or whatever (I think the film's credits name the editing software) and tinkered with.
Ordinarily I review films on opening night, without seeing any trailers or reading any other reviews; I haven't seen any trailers or read any other reviews of Joker because the only writer I rate is myself, but I am aware that the film has been a surprising commercial success. My hunch is that word of mouth will hurt it, but perhaps in future the fact that a relatively low-key character drama made a fortune will inspire Hollywood to spend money on better films than Joker. We can all but dream.
