Movie Review : Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger broke the Joker in 2008. This was it. They had created the ultimate incarnation of Batman's most iconic foe, the one that everyone would want to see over and over again. If Ledger didn’t die of a drug overdose, we would've gotten a whole extended universe explaining why his soulless anarchist was a complicated dude and not such a bad guy after all. When Todd Phillips rebooted a different, more vulnerable and actually complex version of the character in 2019, it was a minor miracle.
A sequel like Joker: Folie à deux could only be a box office failure, but it doesn't mean that it's a bad movie. Au contraire, mes amis.
Joker: Folie à deux is somewhere in between an unsexy courtroom drama where a profoundly disturbed man (Joaquin Phoenix) is repeatedly denied the help he required by the system and a romantic fantasy where the aforementioned disturbed man meets an equally disturbed woman (Lady Gaga) who really likes that he inspired chaos and anarchy. They fall in love, sing songs together and kind of plan for a future they were never going to have together. Because you know: our society likes characters, but it doesn’t like people.
The Art of Not Giving People What They Want
Joker: Folie à deux failed because it’s not an empowerment story about a mental health patient turning into a hyperviolent criminal anarchist. It’s, in many regards a continuation of Joker’s themes, the story of a man who wants to be loved for who he is and ends up being adored for who he isn’t and he doesn’t have the emotional tools to deal with it. Five years ago, Arthur Fleck COULD’ve become Heath Ledger's Joker, but after Folie à deux, Todd Philipps persisted and signed that he just isn’t and it pissed people off.
I’ll give you that it's not a perfect movie. The singing numbers feel shoehorned into the movie and there are cringy scenes, like when Harley Quinn inexplicably breaks into Arthur's cell just to bone him. Sex just isn’t something Arthur is privy to and his virginity makes him even weirder and more off-putting. But Todd Phillips is using Arthur to make a greater point here. He always was: people love characters because they can imbue them with the meaning they want. You creations don’t belong to you.
I’m not going to spoil the final scene, but it is a CLEAR reference to Arthur Fleck’s impossible odds of living up to Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger's Joker. Those who have seen the movie will understand. Arthur Fleck (or any other subsequent Jokers) could not live up to it, but his power reside in the fact that he didn’t WANT to. Arthur Fleck wanted to be loved for being Arthur Fleck. The Joker is an idea with a life of its own that will live with or without his consent. Sue me if you disagree, but I love the defiance of that.
The Greater Picture of Joker : Folie à Deux
You can’t even make a movie to demand of an audience to be better and expect it to be a success. Even less so if it cost 190 millions to make, but it is what Todd Phillips did and the least we could do is understand what it is he was going for here. It’s not new characters and new films we want. As long as we're going to demand to have our old moviegoing experiences over and over again (and large studios are eager to offer us just that) We’re gonna keep being disappointed and heartbroken.
Todd Phillips is daring us to love Arthur Fleck even if his existence goes against everything we've ever loved about Joker, solely based on the fact that Fleck has little to no love in his life and could use it. But Fleck is a sore sight for the eyes and repeatedly refuses the salvation offered by his own audience, so why should we give him? Because we can and because unlike the audience in Todd Phillips’ movies, we know who he really is and what he’s lived through. Todd Phillips dared us to be better and we weren't.
One other weird quirk that handicapped the movie I thought was the fac that you really, really have to see the first one in order to see the second. If you haven’t, you’re going to be confused like there’s no tomorrow because there’s no real new plot points outside the fact that Arthur is fantasizing a live for himself that no one is interested in giving him. So, that was odd and it didn’t quite work. Once again, I think it was by design, though. Todd Phillips just wanted to see the world burn.
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I wouldn’t say Joker : Folie à deux was as good as its predecessor, but it should’ve been a massive conversation starter about what we want out of our entertainment and it wasn’t because… well, it wasn’t what we wanted as our entertainment. We have the culture we deserve, I suppose. Joker : Folie à deux was not an award candidate by any means, but it is such a ballsy wake up call, we should’ve all heard it. It’s one of these movie that will either age well or be completely forgotten in a year.
7.1/10
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