Joker: Folie à Deux review: an oddly timid musical sequel

How strange to remember the mass anxiety, the sheer handwringing unease, that greeted the theatrical release of Joker just five years ago. Were we ever so nervous to think that a grimdark supervillain origin story from the director of the Hangover movies might radicalize anyone? This strikingly derivative Elseworlds prequel did not, in fact, inspire copycat killings, however much its vision of a misfit self-actualizing through violence seemed to sprout from the metastasizing resentments of Trump’s America. But the film did make a billion dollars, win a couple of Oscars, and give comic-book cinema — then at the peak of its popularity — a handsome new wardrobe of Scorsesian gravity and grittiness.

If it’s now difficult to imagine Joker provoking an incel revolution, it’s harder still to picture its sequel having any cultural impact whatsoever. On paper, Joker: Folie à Deux sounds audacious, like a prank Gotham City’s most infamous rogue might play on his own followers: Those expecting another wallow in the #damaged psychology of a clown-prince Travis Bickle will instead be confronted with… a musical about his swooning romance with Harley Quinn. But Todd Phillips, returning to write and direct this dubiously necessary encore, hasn’t fully committed to the bit. Armed with a daring idea, he’s somehow made something curiously timid — a genre experiment unlikely to satisfy old fans or convert many new ones.

Of course, there was really no good reason, beyond the obvious financial incentive, to continue the story the original told. Part of the novelty of Joker was that it seemed to exist beyond the franchise logic of superhero cinema at large; it told a relatively self-contained tale of infamy born from sickness and despair. By the end of the movie, Joaquin Phoenix’s tragically maladjusted Arthur Fleck had completed his journey from outcast to makeup-wearing folk hero of misdirected rage, having inspired a whole city of likeminded anarchists by shooting dead his one-time talk-show idol, Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). With the Joker now fully formed in a padded cell, where else could Phillips take the material?

You go into Folie à Deux expecting, perhaps, to see Phoenix maniacally unleashed — to see a version of Fleck closer to the heavy of DC comics legend and silver screen notoriety. Instead, in the movie’s first major failure of imagination, he’s been essentially reset: Arthur, born anew at the climax of Joker, has tunneled back within himself under psychiatric care, his homicidal tendencies muted by a daily supply of pills and the mocking supervision of the guards (including a brutishly jocular Brendan Gleeson). Skin once again pulled tightly around his bony shoulders and protruding spine, Phoenix sinks effortlessly back into the role that won him an Academy Award, but the performance is redundant. Instead of going full Joker, he’s stuck playing the mirthlessly laughing wallflower again.

Much of the movie is set in Arkham Asylum, which has never looked this ordinary, this devoid of baroque personality. (If the first movie built a Gotham stylishly modeled on the New York City of New Hollywood, there’s no such blueprint applied to the cells and common areas of the mental hospital.) It’s here, awaiting trial for the murders he committed in Joker, that Arthur meets fellow patient Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga) in a therapeutic music program. This allows Phillips to put his own depressive spin on Mad Love, the Batman: The Animated Series episode that laid out the funny-farm backstory of Harley.

Gaga is inspired casting: If anyone is going to make us forget the cartoon pleasures of Margot Robbie’s iconic take on the besotted princess of crime, it’s the devoted jester herself. And there’s a hint of an interesting idea in how Folie à Deux inverts the Joker/Harley dynamic, turning Lee into the dominant force of their love affair — an anarchy groupie trying to coax the darkness back out of Arthur. But the audience may leave wishing Phillips had done that for Gaga. She’s hemmed in by the imperative to play a more emotionally “realistic” Harley Quinn. Why hire this diva only to keep her from cutting loose, as an actor or singer?

An early overhead shot of Arthur crossing asylum grounds while flanked by colorful umbrellas — a visual reference to one of the great screen musicals — teases the Broadway production that will bloom in the killer’s imagination. At least, that’s the general idea once these institutionalized lovers begin warbling their feelings and disappearing into romantic reveries. But Phillips never pays off the promise of an extravagant song-and-dance spectacle, a full-blown Batman musical. His tasteful caution begins with the songbook, a jukebox stocked with pleasant staples from the likes of Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Louis Armstrong. It’s a cheap and easy irony: the homicidal maniac gently singing along to moldy oldies.

As a musical, Folie à Deux is oddly muted. Phoenix and Gaga perform many of the songs at a breathy near-whisper. Is the notion that they’re slow to uncage their inner songbirds, hesitant to open their hearts? It’s Phillips who seems like he’s holding back. The fantasy numbers, like a duet on the Sonny and Cher soundstage in Arthur’s head, quit halfway to splendor. They make the minimalist musical intrusions of Dancer in the Dark look like the height of Technicolor expression. It’s as if Folie à Deux is afraid that going full theater-kid will compromise its air of oppressive bleakness (the reigning vibe of the first film), even though the songs here are supposed to do that. Strangely, the original had a more immediate musical appeal; this sequel aches for the dumb magnificence of Arthur’s dorky victory dance on the stairs, his psychotic jock-jams boogie to Gary Glitter.

Folie à Deux is really a couple of different movies, thinly conceived and awkwardly stitched together. Its half-assed aspirations to Bob Fosse glory eventually take a backseat to its transformation into a bona fide courtroom drama, as Arthur stands trial for his crimes. His lawyer, played by a no-nonsense Catherine Keener, wants to run with the defense that the Joker is explicitly an alternate personality — an idea first floated in the movie’s curveball of an opening scene, a faux Warner Bros. cartoon that vaguely reflects the violence of Joker’s climax. Folie à Deux becomes a kind of litigation of its predecessor, abstractly reckoning with the discourse around that mega-hit. Alas, that’s more interesting in theory than execution; at a certain point, the movie turns into a parade of cameos by the supporting characters of the last film, all popping up for a scene on the witness stand.

Like the first Joker, Folie à Deux looks and sounds great. Phillips was smart to reassemble his dream team, including cinematographer Lawrence Sher, who again supplies the material with more majesty than it deserves. But the director can’t find any soul in the tug-of-war for Arthur’s. And he sympathizes too much with his anti-hero to let him become a figure of danger or dark triumph again; unable to see past the tragedy of Arthur’s arc, Phillips simply reiterates it. The film’s hesitation to embrace its high-concept aspects, to really go for it as a genre reinvention, betrays how hopelessly devoted it is to the morose spirit of Joker. You could say Arthur is imprisoned by his misery. So is Folie à Deux.

Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.