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The easiest way to tell you about Joker: Folie a Deux is to tell you what it’s not.
It’s not a musical, despite heavy billing in that department, and a co-starring role by Lady “A Star Is Born” Gaga. Sure, there are songs, mostly from the middle third of the 20th century — Get Happy, World on a String, That’s Life, That’s Entertainment — but they tend to be warbled or sung-spoken, and to peter out just when they should be hitting their stride.
It’s not a courtroom drama, though large swaths of it do take place in the Gotham courthouse, where Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is on trial for the half-dozen murders he committed in 2019’s Taxi-Driver-inflected Joker. Catherine Keener plays his lawyer, while Harry Lawtey is a young Harvey Dent, newly elected DA and not yet the villainous “Two-Face.”
Oh, and it’s not a superhero movie, or even superhero adjacent. The nearest we get to Batman is a blink-and-miss-it shot of a skyscraper with “Wayne” written on the side.
It’s also not a psychological thriller, even though it features many of the hallmarks of that twisty, hard-to-pin-down genre. But having one character misled by another, or occasionally “waking up” from a musical sort-of-number to discover it was all a dream isn’t really enough psychology to warrant the label. Neither does the fancy French subtitle — folie a deux means “madness for two” — suffice to nudge it into that territory.
So what is it? A long, lugubrious drama I guess. After an opening animated prologue that recalls one of the darker Looney Tunes shorts of the 1950s, we find Arthur thoroughly de-Jokered and languishing in Arkham State Hospital, where the wardens hope he’ll be proven sane enough to stand trial.
Chief among his jailers is Brendan Gleeson as Jackie Sullivan, a brute of a guard who thinks nothing of slamming Arthur’s head into a wall if the inmate oversteps his bounds. But he also allows Arthur to participate in a musical therapy session, which is where he meets Lee Quinzel (Gaga) and falls in a tempestuous love affair.
Or maybe it’s better to call it a love squall, since there are relatively few sparks between the two characters, and Gaga’s performance is a stripped-down, less bombastic version of Quinn than Margot Robbie gave us in Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey.
Director and co-writer Todd Phillips seems content to focus on the internal struggle of his main character, and whether Arthur will ultimately embrace his dull human side, or rebound into the larger-than-life character of Joker. Though I’m honestly not sure it’s a journey we need to spend more than two and a quarter hours making, particularly when Phoenix’s one move to show his Jokier side is to lean backwards like Neo avoiding bullets in The Matrix. It gets old quickly.
There are some other choices that never quite add up, like the inclusion of Jacob Lofland as Ricky, one of Arthur’s fellow inmates at Arkham, whose combination of seeming importance and relatively brief screen time suggest a character who was gutted in editing.
And what to make of a bravura one-take scene that follows Arthur all the way from the courthouse into midtown Gotham, only to cut just before he reaches those iconic stairs we remember from the previous Joker movie. Honestly, if you’re going to construct such an intricate one-take, at least have it land somewhere special.
But this is the overall issue with Folie a Deux. It takes good ideas and refuses to run with them, forever shying away from the big moment or the leap of faith. This is a film that could easily have been many things, but ultimately winds up as none of them.
Joker opens Oct. 4 in theatres.
1.5 stars out of 5