Lawrence Sher’s camera moves through the halls of Arkham State Hospital with a desultory grimness that refuses to let up. There is unceasing misery awash over the early scenes of “Joker: Folie à Deux” as we watch Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) amble through daily life with hostile guards and ambivalent inmates waiting for the murder trial. Although we see brief moments that hint at Arthur’s pugnacious alter-ego Joker, he is mostly a hollow shell of a person. When he meets a mysterious inmate Harleen Quinzell in a music therapy, the two get swept up in a world of song and dance that seems like a match made in heaven and offers “Folie à Deux” to set its tale of fantastical madness to song. If only the script from Scott Silvers and Todd Phillips could more carefully thread the dichotomy between fantasy and reality that the plot offers. If only Phillips’ direction could shrug off its caginess and commit to the possibilities of musical verve that the situations provide.
There is enough in “Folie à Deux” that is provocative, ambitious, strange but also thoughtful and visceral that make it consistently engaging even amidst its strangeness. This film should be offering new inroads into the psychology of the unravelling man at its centre, However, there is not an immediate sense that this new film is doing much with the countenance of Arthur Fleck to distinguish it from its predecessor. Arthur is still miserable and morally ambivalent, sad to consider but rarely empathetic to watch. Phillips’ argument that the world of Gotham is limned in cold austerity is not a new one, and yet there is something enticing about how people recede to their interior fantasies as ways of coping and offering this under the guise of an unreliable narrator of an unreliable love-story bound in song is bold for its sonic and bombastic potential.
But there is a fatal flaw in Todd Phillips’ approach to the musicalisation of Arthur Fleck in “Joker: Folie à Deux” that is explicated in the decision to have the two main characters Joker and Harley Quinn (Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga) perform the numbers live on set rather than perform to pre-recorded tracks. Every note sung in Phillips’ film retains a realistic grittiness. Phoenix and Gaga perform the mostly pre-existing numbers atonally, often resisting the melodic rhythms the songs offer. The idea behind it is clear: This is not a happy world, and the grimy realistic nature of the untouched vocals offer a reality in line with the depravity of this world.
But if the sharpest thematic observance in “Folie à Deux” is the rupture between reality and fantasy, it is a hindrance to the film when Phillips’ is so fearful of audiences finding anything to admire or enjoy in Arthur’s fantasy that he refuses to make the musical sequences aurally or visually exciting. There’s a caginess in Phillips’ direction as he insists on reminding you that Arthur, despite the harm done to him, is no hero. It is a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the idea of Arthur as a misunderstood antihero that’s ethically understandable but artistically unhelpful when it finds the film so often struggling to distinguish that Arthur is both reprehensible but pathetic. It’s one thing for “Folie à Deux” to insist that nothing about Arthur is truly charming, that he is a mere palimpsest of people he yearns to imitate but Phillips forgets that the man’s psychological escapes should at least be pleasurable enough for him to retreat to.
If “Folie à Deux” could gloriously use its musical conceits to emphasise the dichotomy between reality and fantasy, it would better work as a critique of the society it wants to be and as a kind of Brechtian engagement with the musical structure that acknowledges the catharsis audience desperately want while holding back from giving it to them. If only Phillips could realise that imitating Arthur’s stolid mutinous countenance isn’t the only way to reveal the punishing nature of the carceral system or the dizzying way that one might cling to any semblance of emotional escape when trapped in a monotonous hellscape.
It’s hard not to think, for example, of the dizzying juxtapositions between fantasy and reality that mark the musical hall imaged world and the courtroom antics of the merry murderesses of Cook County jail that Rob Marshall and Bill Condon directed and wrote to perfection in 2002’s “Chicago”. In adapting Ebb and Kander’s stage-musical to the screen, the conceit of its deluded protagonist’s flights of fancies, imagining all around her part of her narcissistic vaudeville world allowed that film a smorgasbord of possibility in adapting its musical sequences. It’s a choice that often feels like a perfect parallel to the flights of fancy that Arthur Fleck partakes in. But “Folie à Deux” is immediately crippled by Phillip’s lack of conviction in committing to the musical concept. Even before Harley arrives with the film’s first song Phillips is teasing a restless musicality in “Folie à Deux” that the film refuses to commit to, to its own disadvantage.
Late in the film Harley tells Arthur “You can do anything you want. You’re Joker.” It’s a line that best sums up her foolhardy idea in the concoction of Joker that Arthur struggles to hold on. “Folie à Deux” would be a better film if it took that idea as far as it could. Anything can happen in a musical. It is a film form built on its non reality, that forces audiences to sit with the improbability of communicating through song that allows for a charming resistance to realism. In “Folie à Deux”, Phillips’ muted ending is a sobering one that hopes to repudiate any feeling of uncertainty that the folly of its main characters is mere delusion. But it’s too self-serious in its insistence on that grim fate. For “Folie à Deux” to make its point about the harsh reality that follows the frenetic fantasies, Phillips needed to at least commit to the existence of its fantasies. But “Folie à Deux” doesn’t go far enough. Give us the pomp, give us the ceremony, give us the spectacle. Then pull the rug out from under us. But when Phillips refuses to commit to the grandiosity, the harshness of the reality doesn’t feel cinematic in its revelation. Instead it feels too subdued.
“Folie à Deux” is playing in cinemas.