Often when life prevents me from immediately writing a film review when I get back from the cinema, that comes with a sense of frustration. The earlier you can publish your review, the more likely people are to read it, and I also try to avoid too much delay because then you run the risk that your own opinions will be mixed up with those of others. However, with a film like Joker, allowing 24 hours to consider my thoughts is exactly what I needed, as when I left the cinema, I really didn’t know what to make of it.
Joker is a very unsettling film. Deliberately so of course. It dives head first into some dark, challenging themes, and whilst there is not as much violence as you might perhaps expect, when it does come, it is graphic and horrific. I can’t remember the last time I was disturbed so much by the film, and that speaks to the quality of the film. Everything from the cinematography to the score and in particular the performance by Joaquin Phoenix combine into something which, for better or for worse, will generate an emotional response. This certainly isn’t a generic comic book film which you will have largely forgotten by the time you get home. In fact, it isn’t a comic book film at all, which is something I will get back to shortly, but this is something which will sit with you for a while.
Joker has easily been the most controversial film of 2019, and whilst I suspect a lot of those already angry haven’t actually seen the film, now that I have, I can understand that anger. It would be impossible to fully explore the film’s central theme without going into spoiler territory, but suffice to say that whilst there is a message, shades of grey are deliberately employed in terms of how that message is conveyed. Those shades of grey arguably make the film even more powerful, yet equally more dangerous. At a time when political instability and societal divisions are rife, the timing of this film feels relevant, yet given some of the atrocities we’ve witness in recent years, it is depressingly easy to imagine somebody or a group of people taking the wrong message away from this film with disastrous consequences.
As I’ve mentioned, Joker bears absolutely no resemblance to any comic book film I’ve ever seen. Whilst films like The Dark Knight trilogy have chosen a grittier, more grounded take on the source material, the characters are still larger-than-life. Heath Ledger’s Joker for example was a lot more complex and human in comparison to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal, but there was still a level of charisma and flamboyance which you just don’t see in real life. This film by contrast searches for such a real-world take on the character that you cannot think in terms of superheroes and villains. The links to the Batman mythology are arguably the weakest parts of the film, and if those elements were removed, the narrative would not be altered in the slightest.
Indeed, whilst this character looks like the Joker by the end of the film, that’s not the character I saw in this film. There is having a different take on a character and then there is playing a different character entirely, and in my opinion, this film gives us the latter. Some of the defining characteristics of the Joker such as his charisma, his intellect and most significantly, his anarchistic philosophy, are almost entirely absent. This film feels like something which was never intended to be associated with comic books, but in a Hollywood system where established I.P. is king, it would have been almost impossible to get a film like this made on anywhere near this scale as an original property. So, it was repackaged as a Joker film, and whilst that will undoubtedly be the right decision financially, I would much rather live in a world where the comic book films we get were always intended as comic book films, whilst there is a space in the market for original properties to find an audience.
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