No one will go Gaga for dismal Todd Phillips sequel 'Joker: Folie à Deux'

When everyone’s a victim first, no one wins. When it’s also the central premise of your movie, it tends to spiral into a self-pitying mess.

Like its predecessor, Joker: Folie à Deux is centered on the many ways the title character has suffered, rather than how he has meted very real pain out to others. Despite being institutionalized for the murder spree that has indeed made him infamous, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is in many ways right back where he started: emaciated, bullied, and lonely. Victimhood requires underdog status after all. 

It also nearly guarantees a lack of inward reflection, which dooms this movie from the start. Because what this particular type of white male anxiety is really grappling with isn’t the system it’s trying to indict, but that it’s no longer the standard. This could only be painful for writer-director Todd Phillips, who has made a career out of the repressed anxieties of modern cishet white men. 

The fact that that identity now comes with all sorts of qualifiers is also part of the point; the guys from The Hangover are now less everymen than representative of a particular kind of heteronormative hell. That some sort of depraved binge was required to support it was something of an open secret, and if this resulted in blackouts, so much the better. Freed from all memory and responsibility, one could rejoin respectable civilization and uphold the sacred family norms.

Of course, such generosity only applied to this very particular kind of privileged man, so if you were outside of this demographic, and/or deemed too uptight to take a joke (chicks, amirite?), you were never part of the so-called fun. Likewise, if you can’t necessarily dictate the terms of your victimization, and if, say, victimhood was thrust upon you due to characteristics you had no control over, you’re a hell of a lot less likely to sympathize with Fleck, and how the movie insists on seeing his suffering as a reflection of society.

Warner Bros.

Since the culture has moved on to a certain extent, being forced to acknowledge the pain and trauma of someone other than him results in a self-pitying mess that will please no one. As Joker: Folie à Deux makes its way through its bloated plot stuffed with 50’s era nostalgia songs, Fleck remains a mostly passive observer. When he grandstands, it’s mostly due to the twisted love he finds with Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel, who could be a truly enjoyable version of Harley Quinn if the movie weren’t so determined to hold the fun back.

As it is, Gaga has no chance to make this iteration anything approaching iconic, but it’s certainly memorable. Like many an actress whose role is sidelined for the sake of her male co-star, she nevertheless makes the most of it, keeping Lee’s eyes open a bit too wide, her stare a little too intense, her energy playfully erratic during the few minutes she’s really allowed to stop being Fleck’s groupie and cut loose during the few darkly zany musical numbers. What a waste.

Because for all the retro references, the pop culture Joker: Folie à Deux’s DNA is likely most entwined with is modern in the most depressing way - how it suffers for its embrace of a toxic set of beliefs brings the final season of Game of Thrones to mind. Much like that show’s despicable finale and much that came before, Joker not only fails to follow up on its own intriguing concepts, it refuses to differentiate how power plays out among demographics it insists on flattening rather than exploring. And what we’re left with is a whole lot of nothing rather than anything approaching interesting

Grade: D-