When I first watched 2019′s “Joker,” I couldn’t imagine ever wanting more. While I feel the film is formally well constructed, I found it largely lacking inspiration and perspective. It feels as if a desire to be taken seriously and go to dark places overrides all other considerations. Maturity is intended, but it’s rarely displayed.
I felt there was nothing that could get me even halfway invested in a continuation. I disliked this portrayal of the title character, yet I also felt that his story ended in a compelling enough way. I simply didn’t see how this version of the Clown Prince of Crime (or the world around him) could have anywhere interesting to go.
Then, I learned “Joker: Folie á Deux” would be a musical.
While I still wasn’t entirely on board with the idea of a sequel, this news immediately piqued my interest. Making a “Joker” follow-up into a musical was exactly the kind of bold and strange decision I felt the first film was missing. Perhaps this time I would actually be on board.
The joke, it turns out, was on me.
“Joker: Folie à Deux” picks up soon after the events of “Joker.” Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) now resides in Arkham State Hospital as he awaits trial for a string of five murders he committed in the previous movie — most notably, the televised shooting of talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Todd Phillips returns to direct, writing again alongside Scott Silver.
While the end of “Joker” sees Arthur feel emboldened as his new vengeful persona, “Folie á Deux” sees the character return to the meek state he was in at the beginning of the first movie. In fact, he’s even more joyless than before. Medication keeps him largely subdued as Arkham guards tease him, asking Arthur to put on a happy face, sign their books and tell them jokes. Yet the Joker, it seems, is gone.
“Folie á Deux” may have seemed like a layup for Warner Bros. (“Joker” grossed more than $1 billion and earned 11 Academy Award nominations with two wins), but its success is now unlikely. The film was met with a D CinemaScore this weekend, making it the lowest-rated comic book film in the organization’s 45-year history. THR reported that “Folie á Deux” increased to a massive budget of $190 million, with Phoenix and Phillips each receiving $20 million. It opened to roughly $38 million domestically.
While being escorted through the halls of Arkham, Arthur makes eye contact with Lady Gaga’s Harley “Lee” Quinzel, a new adaptation of Harley Quinn. Lee evokes no past interpretation of Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn from television or comics. She more closely resembles Punchline, a newer partner for the Joker in DC Comics. Lee is another “in name only” adaptation that takes the character in almost an entirely new direction. If only “new” meant “interesting.”
This is a problem shared by the first film. “Joker’s” depiction of the Clown Prince of Crime scarcely resembles anything that came before in decades of comic books and film. This isn’t inherently a bad thing; brilliant adaptations can be made by taking a character or story’s spirit or broad strokes and putting them in a new light.
Yet Arthur, in both films, lacks anything truly captivating to make up for what’s been removed from Joker’s character. Joker is a titanic character known for being intelligent, terrifying, malicious and, above all, funny. These traits are all stripped from Arthur, leaving behind a sad, tortured soul as a vehicle for the screenwriters’ edginess. Aside from a few stellar scenes, he’s an uncompelling lead across both films.
Relationships between Harley and Joker are almost always portrayed as one-sided and abusive. Harley often suffers from the psychopathy of the Clown Prince of Crime after falling into his orbit as an Arkham psychologist. “Folie á Deux” then has a dilemma in its adaptation: if Arthur Fleck lacks the cunning, cruelty and charisma of his comic book counterpart, how do you give him a Harley?
Phillips and Silver approach this issue by flipping the dynamic of Joker and Harley. In the world of “Folie á Deux,” Lee seeks Arthur out after watching a TV movie about his life. She’s a delusional fangirl obsessed with the infamous Joker, hoping to draw him back out of Arthur Fleck so they can “build a mountain” together. There’s never a moment between the two of them where Lee isn’t in charge.
In fact, Lee kickstarts the musical elements of the film by convincing Arthur to sing outside their music class. “Folie á Deux” utilizes pre-existing songs as a jukebox musical, with Arthur and Lee singing such hits as “Bewitched” and “They Long To Be (Close To You).” In one particularly on-the-nose scene, Arthur sings Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s “The Joker” to let audiences know that he feels like the Joker again.
The musical sequences comprise the film’s most engaging moments. Director of Photography Lawrence Sher (nominated for his work on the first film) shoots these scenes beautifully, as he does the rest of the film. His rich cinematography here deserves all the acclaim that was given to the first film and more. Even the film’s musical numbers, however, are sadly held back by an unwillingness to commit to the form. Phillips himself stated he doesn’t love the idea of calling “Folie á Deux” a musical.
“Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue,” he told Variety. “It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”
This hesitancy comes through in the final product. Phillips and Silver portray nearly half of the film’s musical sequences as fantasies, depicting Harley and Joker on ritzy sets to sing about their love. While these scenes are thrilling the first couple of times, they eventually start to feel like a one-trick pony, repeating the same beat without drastically changing the formula. Despite having a similarly heavy story, “Folie á Deux,” as a musical, lacks both the variety and emotion of classics like “West Side Story” or “Les Misérables.”
“Folie á Deux” utilizes the musical concept even worse when it’s not aiming for fantasy. Several of the film’s songs are portrayed in reality; as such, Phoenix and Gaga put on their worst, raspiest singing voices. The intent is that these characters wouldn’t be good singers in real life, but, in real life, they probably wouldn’t be singing at all either.
Most of the songs additionally have Phoenix and Gaga put on their worst, raspiest singing voices, It’s an unforced error that wholly misuses Gaga as a performer, punctuated by her incredible cover of “That’s Life” that plays over the credits. This choice, paired with the overuse of fantasy cutaways, makes “Folie á Deux” seem like a musical created by someone who watches other musicals and asks, “Why are they singing?”
This role reversal of the two characters is, in theory, one of “Folie á Deux’s” more interesting elements. Like many of the film’s elements, however, it feels as if this idea never surpasses the concept stage. Both Lee and her relationship with Arthur are thinly drawn, a surface-level dynamic meant to be at the heart of the film. With multiple shots of Lee not making their way from the trailers into the final cut, one can’t help but wonder how much of the character ended up on the cutting room floor. What’s left of her character, like the rest of the film, merely feels shallow.
A significant amount of “Folie á Deux” simply recaps the plot of the previous film, arriving at a conclusion that was already supported by its predecessor. Arthur Fleck never resembled the Clown Prince of Crime from DC Comics, and he won’t be holding his own in a fight against Batman; rather, he stumbled into becoming a symbol above his station. These reads aren’t particularly deep or nuanced, and Phillips has said as much in interviews since then.
Perhaps these points were missed by some fans of the first film. There are certainly those who idolize the Joker in any incarnation, and I don’t doubt that Arthur Fleck has his real-world worshippers. Still, a sequel dedicated to explaining the finer points of an unsubtle film from five years prior feels pointless and creatively bankrupt.
This constant recapping makes the section of “Folie á Deux” dedicated to Arthur’s trial (arguably the centerpiece of the film) a boring drag. At one point during this stretch, I witnessed an audience member sitting in front of me on his phone, checking different routes on Apple Maps. I can’t speak for him, but I certainly found it more entertaining.
For a single scene, the courtroom drama finds inspiration with the return of a character from the first movie: Leigh Gill’s Gary Puddles. Arthur spared Gary in “Joker” after killing a mutual acquaintance in their presence; in “Folie á Deux,” Gary struggles with the weight of surviving this encounter.
In the scene, Puddles gives perhaps the film’s most emotionally charged performance with only a few minutes of runtime. This moment, however, sadly loses a lot of its teeth due to Phoenix’s performance. The scene is one of the only times Phoenix fully commits to playing up the comedy of Joker’s persona, donning a Foghorn Leghorn accent as he speaks to Gary. It’s a brutal, baffling choice that detracts from the scene far more than it adds to it. Though angling hard for laughs, Phoenix’s decision left my audience nearly silent.
This in no way implies that “Folie á Deux” would suffer from more lightheartedness. Like “Joker,” this film struggles under the weight of dourness. Phillips and Silver portray this world as dreadfully somber, yet their narrative choices never quite reach profundity to make this tone feel worthwhile. The R-rated nature of storytelling paradoxically makes it feel less mature, not more.
Instead, the world simply feels needlessly grim to the point of self-parody. It’s seriousness without substance. Removing all levity from the Joker is strange in its own right, but even if these films were unrelated to their IP, they would seem drab without perspective.
This is emphasized by a narrative decision in the third act that resolves the inner struggle between Arthur Fleck and the Joker. It’s the edgiest moment in a film series full of harsh corners. At best, the decision can be called tasteless, an indicator of the pure, self-indulgent misery that fuels this depiction of Gotham.
In one scene near the end of the film, intended to be an emotional climax, Arthur begs Lee to finally stop singing. Snickers and whispers from my audience made it seem like they agreed. But when “Joker: Folie a Deux’s” only interesting elements derive from its use of music, one has to ask: what happens when the songs are gone? The answer is like the rest of the movie: nothing interesting.