Revisiting JOKER (2019) five years later, only to find I don't like it anymore

Who's laughing now? (Certainly not me.)

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Would that I could toss off a silly one-liner and call it a day, like so many denizens of Letterboxd can seemingly do with ease, perhaps that version of this Joker review might look something like:

JOAQUIN MY PHOENIX 'TIL I JOKE, LOL.

If that's all you need, you may go on your merry way.

But if you're curious to hear some actual thoughts on the film, why not stick around...?

“I never heard him cry. He was always such a happy little boy.”

In 2019, two prominent alumni from The Hangover movies made significant transitions from the raunchy comedies that made their names, to exceedingly serious dramas that seemed rather out of their character.

One of these men was screenwriter Craig Mazin, who went from co-writing the likes of Scary Movie 3 and 4, to creating and writing the acclaimed HBO miniseries, Chernobyl.
The other was director Todd Phillips¹, pivoting away from helming the likes of Road Trip and Old School, to directing the gritty standalone Batman-adjacent drama, Joker.

The resulting projects from both men were considerable cultural touchstones that year, both successful either critically (the universal acclaim for Chernobyl), or commercially (over a billion dollars worldwide for Joker), and both just so happening to share a composer in the form of Icelandic cellist, Hildur Guðnadóttir, who even managed to bag one of the two Oscars that Joker took home the following year, the other, of course, going to Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor.

Revisiting Joker all these years later, my opinion on its quality has cratered harshly, dropping from my initial overly generous 4.5 stars out of 5, down to a measly 2 out of 5. (And that's before I've even seen the overwhelmingly reviled sequel/musical-ashamed-to-be-a-musical, Joker: Folie à Deux. Lord knows what I'll feel about that.)

But what hasn't changed, in the half-decade interim between viewings, is the abiding assessment I've always felt that people's reactions to Joker were all far more interesting than the film itself. 

News media organisations, long before they'd seen the film, were hellbent on spinning a narrative to paint Joker as a dangerous call-to-arms for the incels and mass-shooter types of the world to rally around, expecting (and let's face it, hoping) the film would cause enough provocation to become fodder to feed the 24/7 news cycle... but then the film turned out to be about governmental underfunding of mental health services, exploitation of the working class by rich elites, and a society in capitalist and moral decline, altogether creating the circumstances to produce an Arthur Fleck/Joker in the first place, and thus the mainstream media lost interest, turned tail, and retreated to make mountains out of molehills elsewhere.

Meanwhile, general audience reactions were polarised between those who thought Joker was a lousy, lazy, try-hard Scorsese rip-off, and those who thought it was The Absolute Most Important Film Of Our Time. In that respect, and indelibly within the spirit it feels as though the film was made, Joker is a product of its time as a relic of the era of Trump's first - and dear god please ONLY - term as President.

I remember celebrities rhapsodising about how extraordinary they thought Joker was, with people like Josh Brolin taking to their Instagrams to wax lyrical about how they believed it to be a heartfelt plea for empathy in an increasingly cruel world. This would later be echoed in how Hollywood types would tone-deafly praise Darren Aronofsky's The Whale as being a paean to the need for empathy for the outsiders, the maligned, and the misunderstood of the world, even though both Joker and The Whale have roughly the equivalent understanding and sensitivity towards society's downtrodden as Mugatu's "Derelicte" fashion campaign did in Zoolander.

But the one standout disproportionately positive review for the film that I always recall was the effusive praise espoused by the atheist-turned-conspiracy theorist YouTuber, Armoured Skeptic.²

Back when Joker was newly out in theatres, Armoured Skeptic - a.k.a. Gregory - did a video on his second channel, discussing his thoughts on it with his then-fiancé, Shoe0nHead - a.k.a. June - back when they were still together.
He didn't just love the film... he said Joker was "probably the most important film to our current condition in the 'Western world'", and gave it his "first ever 10 out of 10".

A bit much. But still the kind of prevailing opinion you found among certain contingents of content creators, including that Robert Storms guy who went adorably apoplectic when Joker lost Best Picture to Bong Joon-ho’s infinitely superior Parasite, asking "What is more important to our culture than The Joker [sic]?"
(Storms later admitted he never saw Parasite. Clearly, he just wanted to throw a xenophobic hissy fit over "woke" Hollywood awarding "Best Pitcher" to a foreign film made by people who weren't white or American.)

Here's the thing, okay? Back when I saw Joker for the first time on the big screen, it happened to alarmingly resonate with me on very specific levels, at a very pivotal juncture in my life.
The skeletally frail frame of Phoenix's body, his stomach hollowed beneath his protruding ribcage, felt like a reflection of a prevailing hunger I'd been forced to face for months, when the Department for Work and Pensions decided I was no longer eligible for Personal Independence Payments, suddenly and vastly diminishing my monthly funds, and my ability to buy enough food, to the point that I lost over 30lbs (13kg) from enforced starvation.
The image of Arthur Fleck walking alone through cold, empty streets, wearily wearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, climbing those steps with leaden feet, captured a feeling of loneliness and aching tired ennui I've often felt long before, and long after, I saw it depicted in the film.
The incidental detail in those moments, of Arthur clutching a paper bag filled with prescription drugs, reminded me of all the years I had to collect a bag chock full of prescribed medications for my mother. (Dihydrocodeine, baclofen, diazepam, diclofenac, flavoxate, amitriptyline, atorvastatin, insulin, lantus... can't ever forget that list I had to memorise.)
The fact that Arthur lives with and looks after his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), well into adulthood, mirrored the years I spent being my mother's carer from the ages of 11 to 24, before her sudden death in 2017.
And then the clincher. The film goes and adds the revelations of Penny being a compulsive liar with delusions of grandeur, lying to Arthur all his life about so much of what he thought he knew about himself and his lineage, and having quote-unquote "delusional psychosis, narcissistic personality disorder," and being "accused of endangering her own child."
I never suffered any physical abuse like Arthur did in his childhood, nor did my mother ever claim I was secretly related to a billionaire who could bail us out of our wretched existence if he only knew about us... but she was absolutely a toxic narcissist; she absolutely had delusions of grandeur, and just plain delusions period, including the ones about her dreams predicting a future when rich and famous men would one day find her so charming and amazing that they'd fall over themselves to fix her life; and she was (rightfully) accused of parental neglect of me, to the point that I was briefly put on the Child Protection Register in 2007.

To those ends, Joker acted like a mirror I couldn't help but see myself in, and in so doing, it reflected a personal yet universal agony that lead me to favouring the film far more than I should have.

Because now, five years later, it doesn't speak to me - nor for me - in any of the ways it once did. 

Five years of enduring financial instability and poverty... five years of struggling to afford food month after month... five years of being shunted from one fruitless governmental job-seeking program to another, my health always the biggest obstacle, until they gave up and said I had limited work capability... five years of enduring a pandemic, multiple prime ministers, endless political upheavals and scandals and corruption, protests, riots, and genocides across the world perpetrated, prioritised, and funded by our governments before they ever fund their own ailing countries... five years of all of that has irrevocably changed me. How could it not? 

And with that change comes the side effect of finding Joker to mostly be everything its detractors said it was all along. 

In its defence, I will go to bat(man) for Guðnadóttir's elegiacally mournful score. I had been a fan of hers for several years before the film, thanks to the time in the early 2010's when I was writing a screenplay for a horror film that'll never get made, and during my trawls through iTunes to find pre-existing music that sounded appropriate for the mood I wanted to conjure, I happened upon her solo albums, Mount A, and Without Sinking.³
Guðnadóttir's haunting cello-lead soundscapes lend the film an intensity, emotional pathos, and gravitas it wouldn't be able to earn by itself, and she more than deserved that Oscar for her work.

Praise is worth bestowing also to the gorgeous cinematography of Lawrence Sher; the dedicated performance from Joaquin Phoenix (who may not be the best Joker, but is undeniably a billion times better Joker than the one played by that other Oscar-winning, annoyingly method actor whose first name begins with "J"); and credit where credit is due, I was always intrigued by the small-yet-consequential tweaks made to longstanding Batman lore by Phillips' and Scott Silver's story, be it the teased (but eventually debunked) potential that this universe's Joker and Bruce Wayne could've been brothers, or the non-lionisation of portraying Thomas Wayne as an 80's-era Reaganite who, among the city's ultra-wealthy elite, made Gotham City be so divided by class disparity, and so rotten by public service underfunding. Whether or not this notion of Bruce Wayne's father being evil, and helping to create the very circumstances that made his son an orphan who'd go on to fight an endless battle under cape and cowl, has been done in the comics before, I have no idea. But after Christopher Nolan's Batman films kept Thomas Wayne as a positive figure of inspiration whose killing was an undeserved tragedy, Joker's conception of him as a negative figure of corruption and inequality felt fresh.
A few years later, Matt Reeves' The Batman would similarly concern itself with muddying the purity of the image of Bruce Wayne's father, but whereas Phillips paints him as a uncaring scion of using his wealth to influence politics for the benefit of anyone but the poor, Reeves struck a balance between Nolan's and Phillips' portrayals of Thomas Wayne, making him a decent but complicated man who made bad decisions for what he thought would be good outcomes.

Beyond those few high points, Joker now leaves me bereft of feeling. To my present perception, it's deathly dreary in its one-note miserablism, unleavened by any truly adroit sociopolitical or psychological insights. It has a plethora of worthwhile themes to explore, and timely messages to impart, but it handles them with the blunt-force non-subtlety of a brick to the head. The dialogue often feels artificial and simplistically on-the-nose - ("I thought my life was a tragedy, but now I know it's a fucking comedy") - as though this never got past a first draft that only had placeholder, thesis-statement dialogue prompts, which were meant to be fleshed out with greater nuance and naturalism later, but never found the time to do so. And while I never really had an issue with Todd Phillips cribbing heavily from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and doubly especially from The King of Comedy, because it was in service of making a Batman-related movie that felt like a gritty 70's crime drama instead of a modern-day CGI spectacle, I do now feel how devoid of individual vision Joker is, for it cannot exist without colouring within the lines drawn by previous filmmakers Phillips wanted to emulate. Getting Robert De Niro in to play Murray Franklin - inhabiting the equivalent role Jerry Lewis played in The King of Comedy, where De Niro's Rupert Pupkin was once the equivalent of Phoenix's Arthur Fleck - is a cool casting coup, but it is also indicative of how beholden and indebted Phillips is to that eternally underrated and prescient Scorsese gem, with him perhaps even relying on The King of Comedy's comparative lack of general audience familiarity to afford him a shine gleaned off the back of Scorsese's work.

For a long time, I was of the opinion that Joker was neither quite as bad as its harshest critics said, nor quite as good as its most adoring fans said, but rather somewhere in the middle, with overreactions on either end of the spectrum putting too much stock into its purported importance.

Now I just think it's a pretentious bore, a mind-numbing slog to get through, with a conclusion that feels like five endings stacked on top of each other, dragging on interminably without knowing when to satisfyingly stop.

It is merely mediocre Oscar bait, and the Academy fell for it. But at least not so much that they gave it Best Picture, and definitely not enough to try saying with a straight face that Todd Phillips was Best Director, which would've been many people's Joker moment if that had possibility came true.

For me, though, my Joker moment should've come when Phillips decided to use a goddamn Gary Glitter song for the big iconic dancing-on-the-steps scene. Like, he couldn't have picked a different period-appropriate song by anyone else?! He just had to deploy a needle drop from a man known more for being a convicted pedophile, and Jimmy Savile associate/accomplice, than he ever was for his music career? 

Maybe the massive flopping of Joker: Folie à Deux is the universe's retributional karmic joke at Phillips' expense for allowing that colossal cock-up to occur...

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Rating: ★★

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1. (Yes, he had already started distancing himself from comedy when he directed War Dogs, but that still had comedic elements, as opposed to Joker's monotonous moribund moroseness.) 

2. (Yes, I regretfully confess that during this period of 2019, I was still dabbling in watching content from the likes of Armoured Skeptic, Shoe0nHead, ChrisRayGun, PewDiePie, iDubbz, and H3H3 Productions. Thankfully, I never got indoctrinated enough by their collective web of "edgy" rhetorics - some of which some of them have distanced themselves from in later years, others downplaying their roles in once propagating perspectives that lead many viewers to the alt-right - and by extension, I'm fortunate to have never become enamoured with the more insipid wankers you found deeper down that YouTube algorithmic rabbit hole, such as Sargon of Akkad, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, or god forbid, Ben Shapiro. I eventually got the good sense to disregard the vast majority of the poorly-aged opinions of those on the somewhat milder end of the centrist-bordering-on-conservative spectrum... but for a moment there, I was at risk of taking a very wrong turn in my ideologies, and becoming a worse person as a result.)

3. (This foreknowledge of her work is what allowed me to clock that on the Joker score, the track 'Penny Taken to the Hospital' is basically a remake of the track 'Opaque' from Without Sinking. Was this because 'Opaque' was used as temp music during editing, and she was asked to make an alternate version? Or did she do a spot of self-plagiarising material recycling, in the vein of Hans Zimmer, James Horner, John Williams, and probably most composers ever?)