When Joker came out in 2019, it was greeted with a firestorm of controversy about its potential to instigate violence that verged on a moral panic. The furor didn’t come out of nowhere. Todd Phillips’s atypical comic-book origin story took place in a Gotham City that resembled 1970s New York and riffed on Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy in telling the story of failed comedian and eventual killer Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). But its depiction of a downtrodden outcast who embraces violence and clown makeup also existed in the orbit of edgelord 4chan memes and the 2012 Aurora mass shooting, which took place at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. (It wasn’t actually inspired by the DC villain, but, thanks to an erroneous statement from then–New York police commissioner Ray Kelly, continues to be associated with the character anyway.) Joker, thankfully, didn’t turn out to be dangerous. It did turn out to be a hit, an intentional ideological muddle of a movie that didn’t have all that much on its mind but made enough of a show of psychological complexity to brand itself as more sophisticated than the average blockbuster.
Phillips may actually have even less on his mind in terms of a guiding idea for his punishing sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux. What we do get owes as much to the conversation around the first film as it does to what happened in it. The new installment picks up two years after Arthur murdered talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) live on air and sparked sympathetic riots in response. While Arthur’s been heavily medicated and confined to the high-security ward at Arkham State Hospital, he has repeatedly been ruled mentally competent and is finally set to go to trial for killing (six, counting his mother) people — an event that becomes a media circus and that also turns him into a folk hero for the nihilistic outlaws and outcasts who start gathering outside the courthouse to cheer him on. The primary joke of Folie à Deux is that Arthur has, in fact, become the incel icon so many fretted he’d be framed as when Joker came out — only it’s a role the character never set out to play, and, as the film goes on, he feels less and less sure he actually wants it.
The secondary joke of Folie à Deux is that while it’s a jukebox musical whose song selections range from Stevie Wonder to MGM standards, it is perversely dedicated to eliminating as much pleasure as possible from its song and dance numbers. The sole exception comes when Arthur attends an Arkham movie-night screening of the 1953 Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon. It’s primarily for lower-security patients like Harley “Lee” Quinn (Lady Gaga), whom he meets-cute with in the hallway one day — him hurried away by guards, her miming shooting herself in the head — and gets to know better during one of the institution’s music classes. Lee’s an arsonist who sets a fire in the back of the auditorium to get extra time with the object of her obsession. As everyone else flees, she and Arthur stand in the beam of the projector, and she begins singing “If My Friends Could See Me Now” before grabbing his hand and pulling him out in the courtyard for a dance in the rain among the arriving fire trucks and guard-tower spotlights. It’s a rapturous, reaching height the movie never bothers with again. When the characters sing elsewhere, it’s either onstage hosting an imaginary variety show or within what’s basically still the reality of the scene, always with a lack of energy.
Early on, Folie à Deux offers one lovely visual — an overhead shot of Arthur being escorted through the rain by four guards carrying brightly colored umbrellas, though when we cut to their backs, the umbrellas are revealed to all actually be black. But the movie otherwise is allergic to those kinds of dynamic leaps into fantasy, even if its musical sequences are supposed to represent the shared romantic delusions that Arthur and Lee get caught up in. If Phillips intended those moments to feel more sung through instead of like departures, as in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, he should have considered that the vibrant Jacques Demy musical is also stunning to look at. In its relentless gloom, Folie à Deux plunks Gaga in a visitation booth where she tries to pretend she couldn’t blow the plexiglass walls off the place with her rendition of “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” It’s a waste of her presence, even if the courtroom-suit version of a Harley Quinn outfit that she dons as the film approaches its climax is destined to inspire thousands of imitators come Halloween. Her Lee isn’t an equal partner to Arthur but another accessory in his grand tragedy — a supercharged, scary-eyed take on a serial-killer groupie.
Joker: Folie à Deux is Arthur’s movie, and Arthur just isn’t that interesting, despite how much effort Phoenix puts into rendering the character in exquisitely anguished mental and sunken-chested physical detail. In the film, Arthur is a void onto which others project what they want to see. He has a split personality, according to his devoted lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener). He’s someone faking a mental illness, according to DA Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey). He’s a charismatic troll who tells the world to go fuck itself, according to his fans, among them Lee, who says that when she watched him murder Murray Franklin, “for once in my life I didn’t feel so alone anymore.” Phillips can’t seem to pinpoint what Arthur is either. He positions him as deeply unwell at certain times and entirely aware of and responsible for his own actions in others, sometimes culpable, and sometimes a helpless victim. Mostly, Arthur is acted upon, even when he thinks he’s seizing control — a punching bag for the world and, more importantly, for the director, who subjects the character to so many indignities that he actually stops being pitiable and starts resembling the punch line to a very long, shaggy joke. By the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, that joke feels like it’s on us.
