[Nicole Kidman commercial]: We come to this place for magic… We come to AMC Theaters to laugh, to cry, to care.
[NatSnd from Pixabay: *Record Scratch* *Fast Forward*]
And sometimes to awkwardly gawk at the screen, I guess?
[Music: “Slap that Bass” from Joker: Folie a Deux]
If you were alive in 2019, you probably remember the neverending slew of Joker memes — mostly from the edgelord community — fully cementing the Todd Phillips movie in the cultural zeitgeist despite a middling critical reception.
The first Joker follows Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a mentally disturbed clown and struggling stand-up comic as he increasingly loses grasp on reality. The often unsettling movie depicts Fleck’s six gory murders, transforming along the way from a troubled loner to the Joker, an angry, homicidal foil for the exploited Gotham working class.
But even die-hard fans were skeptical about Joker’s return to the screen.
Apollo Umbra: After I saw the first one, I was like, oh, this is perfect. It ends right there. That is the end. That’s all I needed. I didn’t really want there to be a sequel.
That’s fourth-year theater major Apollo Umbra, a fellow movie-goer I met outside the theater. Umbra, a DC comic superfan, dragged along two friends, second-year theater majors Zakariah Hany Massoud and Marilena Kolokotsa, who, like me, had just finished watching the first Joker in preparation for the sequel.
But whatever expectations we had going in from the first movie, Folie a Deux quickly assured us that this would be a viewing experience like no other. The film opens with a Looney-Tunes inspired cartoon of the Joker fighting his shadow as he prepares to go onto a comedy show set. This short establishes the movie’s two overarching themes: Fleck’s internal struggle between his humanity and the Joker persona, and the at times off-putting campiness used to explore his inner psyche.
What do I mean by that? Well, for starters, it’s a musical.
[Music: “For Once in My Life”]: “For once in my life, I have someone who needs me. Someone I’ve needed so long.”
But it’s not your average musical. Folie a Deux mixes your classic ritzy, soundbooth-recorded songs with slightly off-key, warbled numbers from Phoenix and Lady Gaga, co-starring as the love interest Harleen Quinzel, sung in real time. The effect was confusion; it was often hard to discern what was happening in real time versus in their minds, a tactic employed well by the first movie. However, by adding a musical element into the mix, Folie a Deux injected a dose of awkwardness into the viewer’s confusion, to mixed results.
Kolokotsa wasn’t a fan.
Marilena Kolokotsa: “I found the musical theater aspect so out of place. The plot is already not running smoothly as opposed to the first one. It’s just like, you never know where it’s gonna end.”
But Umbra thought that the “out-of-place-ness” of the music was the point, and, in fact, improved the storyline.
Umbra: “The reason you use music is because it conveys more emotion than just speaking. In this, I think they use it as a really clear barrier to blur the line between reality and fantasy in their minds. I think it’s really interesting that it’s used here because he doesn’t have that in the first movie until he’s introduced to this new love interest, and it’s the first time anyone reciprocates it. To her, it’s also a fantasy, but she knows it’s a fantasy and he doesn’t. So, the music is their language with each other, and I think that’s really interesting.”
While the quasi-musical love story takes up half of the plot, the other half is dominated by Fleck’s murder trial,
[Joker: Folie a Deux trailer]: “Two years ago, the name Arthur Fleck hit Gotham like a hurricane. The trial of the century. They believe Fleck to be some kind of martyr.”
As a former mock trial kid, I’m a sucker for a good trial movie, and this part of the story kept me rapt. As the scenes inside of the courtroom got progressively more animated and absurd, the camera continued to pan back out to the growing crowd outside, hungry for justice for the Joker, the symbol for Gotham’s exploited class, if not necessarily for Fleck, the mentally ill murderer of six. It was this part of the movie, less so than the love story, that carried the weight of the previous film’s political message. Hany Massoud appreciated this as well:
Hany Massoud: “His defense lawyer, who he fires, doesn’t even want to get him released from prison. She just wants to get him put into an actual hospital, and they are still so aggressively pushing for him to just get killed. I think that says a lot about the system here.”
So Folie a Deux has some romance, some at-times awkward singing and a resonant political message. But how does it stand as a sequel?
Umbra: “I don’t think it was necessary, but at the same time, I don’t think it hurts anything.”
And, honestly? That’s how I feel about watching the movie as a whole. I left the theater with some new thoughts and new friends, but I can’t say I’d go back for seconds. If you’re curious to see how Todd Phillip ends his Joker saga, it’s worth a watch — but maybe wait until it comes out on streaming.
For WNUR News, I’m Gabby Shell.
[Music: “That’s Life”]
