Split Personalities: the Divided Public Opinion on Todd Phillips’ Joker
By Maegan Krohn and Natasha Boord, 10/25/19
Rating: R
Genre: Crime Drama/Thriller
Length: 2 hours 2 minutes
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Marc Maron, and Zazie Beetz
Natasha Boord, Social Media Intern
Before getting straight into the film, I would like to mention the experience of going to the theater first. Something I never understood was when I went to purchase my ticket there was even a piece of paper saying people who are under seventeen seeing The Joker must be accompanied with someone else. I just thought they are making it seem like its for safety, but that is the legal law for a rated R film.
Now for the film and my opinion on it. I tried to not have expectations walking in, but its hard with seeing a film of an iconic character. I can say after seeing it Joaquin Phoenix did a great job. The Joker does have multiple story lines from comic books so I do understand it is only one take on his origin story. I enjoyed this origin of Joker and showed on how someone could become this insane. Even though it’s not the Joker we know I enjoyed his story.
No actor stuck out like a sore thumb they all played their parts well. Seeing the gradual journey of the Joker becoming his iconic self was interesting to see. A concern or a dislike I’ve heard was you start to feel bad for the Joker. That was not true for me I mean he discovers the act of murdering which he finds a better coping tool then laughing. He becomes a psychopath because the government of Gotham puts money above mental health. So do I feel bad for him because he was treated poorly? I do because he is a human and people with mental health should be given rights like anyone else. Do I feel bad for him later in the film with the actions he has chosen? No, I do not because he is a murderer. He took a path of violence and seeing the act instantly not bother him, but made him feel good.The issue people are having is that he is a killer so we can’t have any pity at all. That is not true you can feel bad for a human being who has gone through awful things while knowing he is a bad person and deserves to be locked up.
Overall I was entertained by this film. I can enjoy a film even with small flaws because in general it was a good film. Some things if I were to pick them out would be me loving the Joker too much and how I have seen him so I was not able to be satisfied with this Joker entirely. I understand it’s a different viewpoint of the Joker, but I would have loved it more if he wasn’t so pathetic. I was watching a review on H3H3’s channel and we both had similar thoughts on this. Unlike past Jokers they were usually a bit smart, but he was just mentally disabled and broken. So what I do to ignore this factor is that this is the origin so maybe he develops later on. He stopped taking his medication and I noticed a bit of a difference in him so maybe that was the direction they intended. Some other snags that bothered me was the fridge scene. I did not get the purpose of him climbing in the fridge. Another scene was him killing his co-worker and not stating how he gets rid of the body without being seen.
With all the reviews and the news showcasing this film as too violent and having Joker as the protagonist is just encouraging others to be violent. I can smack those assumptions down with my next statement. No one can have that backstory like this fictional character. He grew up with a mentally insane mother and a father who hurt him. He developed mental illness due to the abuse and his coping mechanism became a mental illness as well which only caused him to have a harder time getting a job. Plus it takes place in the fictional world of Gotham which is depressing in itself with an awful economy in the first place. So a random audience member is not just going to start committing violence after seeing this film. I mean the film is violent, but not out of the ordinary, especially for a rated R film. Watching violence or playing violent video games has been quite the hot button issue for years, but viewing does not change the person mentally wanting to commit such acts themselves.
So I felt the violence was overhyped for the film. I think in general it only promoted the film more having it discussed as much as it was in the news. I think more filmmakers should take risks with unconventional characters. Not every main character needs to be loved. Art should not be limited.
Maegan Krohn, Features Editor
I had to give myself a solid three to four days after watching the new Joker before trying to form my thoughts into any sort of cohesive piece. I feel like I went through some kind of weird grieving process after seeing Joker. I left the theater feeling great, feeling excited, feeling glad because it was the first movie in a while that I had left thinking, “Wow, that was really good.” And then I thought about it for a few days, because I knew that was way too good to be true.
So, yeah, here’s the sort of madness you descend into after ruminating on a movie about one of the (arguably) edgiest figures to exist in modern media. This isn’t exhaustive, but these are my big thoughts. There’s spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, probably don’t read!
Joker spends the entire first hour and a half of its two-hour runtime telling us all about Arthur Fleck’s battle with society and his descent into madness due to being mistreated by this horrible system. I will say, they do a great job of helping you sympathize with Arthur. He’s not immediately unlikable, he’s not rude; he genuinely is just misunderstood. I actually loved the subtle characterization of Arthur in the beginning of the movie. There’s a scene where Arthur is sitting in a comedy club watching stand-up and he’s taking notes about audience reactions and how the comedian is acting to get these responses, and it shows how truly socially inept he is while still not losing him on the audience. It was actually pretty endearing, and showed that he really did just want to be a comedian.
This is also true for a card that Arthur hands out to people when he goes into his laughing fits that explains his condition. These small moments that built Arthur’s character, paired up with Joaquin Phoenix’s stunning performance really made the beginning of the movie for me. I won’t go on about Phoenix’s acting because I think a lot of people have done that already; we know it’s great. He embodies the true comic book Joker to a lot of people, with the grandeur and more kooky personality that still has a real darkness behind it. That was great.
I adored the score in this movie. The moody strings aren’t everyone’s favorite, but I think they really made the whole thing. I loved how they really matched Arthur’s energy and helped carry us through the film smoothly. They established the mood and were one of the only things that brought consistency to the film between the beginning and the end, but I’ll talk about that disconnect in a second.
I will say though, everyone in this movie was comically mean. Like, outlandishly rude. At the beginning of the movie, Arthur’s a sign twirler for a store that’s going out of business (which he got signed up for through his… Clown talent company? That was weird, but we won’t unpack that), and he gets jumped by a bunch of kids who beat him up and destroy the sign after he pitifully chases them for blocks trying to get it back. His boss then presses him, accusing him of stealing the sign because… He’s weird? And urges him to return the sign. Arthur even says in this scene, “Why would I steal the sign?” And, you know, same. His boss threatens his job and sends him away. It makes no sense.
There’s a moment where Arthur is on the bus and he makes some silly faces at a kid and makes him audibly laugh, and the kid’s mom grabs him and says “Quit bothering my kid,” and stares daggers at Arthur. I mean, what? The kid was laughing. Audibly laughing. And Arthur was doing nothing more than making some silly and clearly harmless faces at him. But… Okay, lady.
I won’t lie, I would probably go crazy too if everyone was as ridiculously mean to me as people are to Arthur in this movie. You could keep a tally of how many times people are just terrible to Arthur, way more than anyone would realistically be, and you would probably lose count. It was a little exhausting.
There’s a twist that’s a little… Lazy, to say the least. We’re introduced to a girl who becomes Arthur’s sort of love interest after they interact in the elevator inside of their apartment building. Let me tell you: every single woman in the audience knew that this was not real in the scene immediately following when they meet, when Arthur stalks her and she becomes interested in him because of it. We get a moment in the turning point of the movie when it’s revealed to us that Arthur has been hallucinating all of his interactions with her, and you’re just kind of like ‘I mean, yeah.’ It felt a little pointless to include other than to give him someone to talk to sometimes and to have a special twist that shows how crazy he is.
This leads me into the turning point and second half (well, last thirty minutes or so, but we’ll call it ‘the second half’ for the sake of convenience) of the movie, which… Is a point of contention for me. I liked the second half of the movie. It left me reeling. The excitement and all the activity was what made leave feeling so great. But, I have to say, it was more than a little disjointed.
Outside of the growing violence in the first half of the movie, it’s pretty mellow. We’re just sort of following Arthur as he tries to live his life and fails (because of the outside world, obviously), and we’re given some political drama regarding Thomas Wayne. Oh, I guess I should talk about that. Quick sidebar about Thomas Wayne in this movie:
This was a part that I appreciated. The Batman series, in all its mediums, is typically very black and white: Batman good guy, Joker crazy bad guy, how could you ever dislike Batman, he fights for the greater good, and Joker’s just crazy so we can’t like him! This movie brings some nuance to that. Thomas Wayne is another figure we can add to the list of people that abuse Arthur (he literally just punches him in a movie theater), and he’s not very well liked publically, either. People argue that he’s essentially an evil capitalist trope, who doesn’t care about the little guy, and so little guy fights. It’s a little cliche, but I like the new side of the coin to the Wayne family we get from this. Anywho…
The second half of the movie just takes off. Everyone’s thinking, yeah, yeah, where’s the crazy stuff? Or, at least, that’s probably what they were thinking when they wrote the movie. Arthur’s descent goes from a descent to more of a plunge between the beginning and the end of the movie. It’s steady, and then really just drops off randomly. He’s done brooding, he’s just crazy now. He’s the crazy guy now. You guys see that? He’s crazy now.
The energy at the end of the movie is astounding. It’s fast paced, it gets your blood pumping, and Joaquin Phoenix is really trying hard to maintain the character he’s created for us. However… if it’s challenged on paper, a good actor can’t save it. Both of the characters, beginning Arthur and end Arthur, are great. But… They’re two different characters. We get a bit of the same issue that a lot of other DC live-action movies have suffered from, which is trying way too hard to bring everything to a head and have an explosive conclusion.
We get our obligatory “society failed me” speech from Arthur, which was only about as edgy as I expected it to be, so that’s actually not terrible. I feel like the movie kind of forgets its message, though. Arthur shoots the talk show host and there’s a moment where he goes up to camera and the shot zooms out and reveals all these TVs that are showing the different moments leading up to what’s happened, giving the audience the whole “the world is watching,” social media kind of vibe, which is not at all what the rest of the movie is about? And then Arthur embraces his place as the leader of this crazy movement and chaos (riots are burning around him), even though he states that he’s “not being political,” and makes it clear that he’s not interested in starting a movement. But he seems to really like it, too. I think the writers got a little too excited about including certain things and forgot about the character and message they’d established already.
Did Joker entertain me overall? Yeah, absolutely. I think the score was great, I loved Joaquin Phoenix (who doesn’t?), and outside of any overly critical points, yes, Joker was great. Upon reflection, though… A little wonky. A lot of things that seemed like oversights or that should have been reviewed a little further. But, hey, I guess it’s like two movies in one!
I’ll say that Joker was a 7/10 for me.