Joker is a deeply depressing work that disappoints on numerous levels. But the most dispiriting aspect about the whole, yawn, phenomenon, is how willingly so many people have been led by the nose to dutifully sit down and watch it. And then, despite having seen it, how obediently they then insist on telling the world how thrilled they were with it, describing it, even, and astonishingly, as daring.
Remarkably, this malaise went so far as to infect the jury at the traditionally reliable Venice Film Festival, where it won their top prize.
We all know the broad outline of the story. A professional clown and would-be comedian feels so unloved and under-appreciated that he decides to take his revenge on a society gone wrong, by turning to random violence. What Joker does do more than anything else is to highlight the difference between films and movies.
It could, had it chosen to, have been a small, independent film that explored the plight of an ordinary individual, as he struggles to come to terms with a society that seems to have degenerated so completely, that trying to live in it, to merely exist, has become more than his crushed spirit can bear. And his only means of coping is to blur the reality of the world that he lives in, and the world of his imagination, so completely, that they merge into one.
That was the film that Martin Scorsese made with Taxi Driver (’76), and then with The King of Comedy (’83), both of which are minor masterpieces — Raging Bull (’80) is his unqualified triumph. And both of which starred Robert de Nero, who also reappears here in the Jerry Lewis role.
As a matter of fact, Joker has almost every single element that went into the making of those two films, except for one thing; ideas. It makes absolutely no attempt to in any way explore those elements or to investigate the world it presents.
Well okay, then, so it’s not a small, thought-provoking portrait of a small man with big dreams finding it increasingly hard to cope. We’re in the world of comic book heroes, and we should have known that from the title. So we’re dealing with one-dimensional archetypes, and this is just the back-story for a figure who will become one of Batman’s arch enemies. But if that’s what it’s supposed to be, then it fails abjectly.
It’s so grim, and humourless, and mean-spirited, and just plain nasty. Comic book films, when they work, have an energy and a joie de vivre that at the very least diverts and on occasion thrills. Joker is just so unremittingly unpleasant that all it ends up being is un-watchably dull. So it fails as much as a movie as it does as a film.
As Sam Fuller so memorably opined in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (’65), films, more than anything else, are about emotion*. The reason the stakes are so terribly high in the cinema is because it deals with real, live, flesh and blood human beings. Because they are the things we get emotional about. That’s what Scorsese was getting at when he made those comments about Marvel movies that so irritated the rabble:
“It isn’t the cinema of human beings.”
How could it be? They are not, by definition, human. They’re super heroes. That’s their whole point. And that’s why so many of us find it impossible to care one way or the other what ever happens to them.
But that doesn’t matter, because movies aren’t about emotion. They are solely concerned with percentage points, gross, territories, platforms, outlay, merch, net profits and all the other elements that go to make up the world of marketing. And that’s the level, and the only level that Joker succeeds on. But that’s the only thing that anyone involved with the project was evidently interested in.
*What he actually says, if you watch the clip here, is emotions, which seriously undercuts what ought to have been his point. But that’s a whole other blog post in of itself.
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