BEFORE: The last three crime films have led me here, to a film about the "Clown Prince of Crime" - it makes sense, right? Part of me regrets not getting to this one during calendar year 2019, but hey, now it's Oscar season and this film is starting to get some buzz, being nominated for Best Picture and all. I know people are probably still remembering that Heath Ledger won an Oscar for playing the Joker in "The Dark Knight" and perhaps everyone is thinking that lightning might strike twice - is it possible? Time to find out...
Robert De Niro carries over from "Heist" for the last time this month, but the end of Robert De Niro Week is also the start of a whole week of films based on DC Comics.
THE PLOT: In Gotham City, mentally troubled comedian Arthur Fleck is disregarded and mistreated by society. He then embarks on a downward spiral of revolultion and bloody crime. This path brings him face-to-face with his alter-ego: the Joker.
AFTER: I've been reading Batman comics since 1983 or so, so I may be over-qualified to comment here, my history of learning about Batman's villains has been ongoing, and indeed if you ask me about the Joker, I may reply with "which one"? Even the comic-book Batman has been re-booted at least twice since I started reading, meaning they went back to his origin story and updated it to land new readers, or in one case they dissolved an entire universe just to scrap everything and start over.
Because it turns out that the DC universe is really a multi-verse, meaning that there are many parallel realities existing simultaneously - in fact, it's always been this way, back in the old days there was the Justice League of America and also the Justice Society, and one existed on Earth-1 and the other was on Earth-2, and I think once a year the two teams would cross over and have a picnic or something. I don't know how anybody kept it all straight back in the day, but one team had Jay Garrick as the Flash and the other had Barry Allen as the Flash, for example. A lot of this was before my time, and I started reading shortly after an event called "Crisis on Infinite Earths", which tried to clear up a lot of the overblown continuity problems and return the DC universe to ONE timeline, ONE set of characters. This seemed like a pretty good place for me to jump on board, so I started with Batman's and Superman's updated origin stories in 1983 - "Batman: Year One" and the miniseries "The Man of Steel".
Things were fine until DC decided to tell a group of stories called "Elseworlds", these were stories set out of the main continuity, with new twists on classic characters - the first was "Gotham by Gaslight", which set Batman in the Victorian era, tracking down Jack the Ripper. Many other one-shot stories followed, such as "Superman: Red Son" (Kal-el's rocket landed in Soviet Russia), "Batman & Dracula: Red Rain", "Batman: The Blue, the Gray and the Bat" (Batman during the Civil War), "Superman: War of the Worlds" (Superman vs. classic martians) and the future-set mini-series "Kingdom Come". If this is all starting to sound a bit like "Into the Spider-Verse", you're not far wrong. The Elseworlds stories really opened the door toward creating a new multi-verse, the only limits on the new realities were up to the writers' imaginations.
And then before you know it, DC scrapped everything again with "Infinite Crisis" in 2005, then "Final Crisis" in 2008, and then in 2001 the "Flashpoint" event gave way to "The New 52", which was meant to be the last word on updating the DC universe for modern times. Only not everybody liked it, so in 2016 along came "Rebirth", another line-wide reboot that brought back some of the most popular characters from the pre-"Flashpoint" continuity. Look, can we all just admit this is doomed to constantly be an ongoing process? DC is going to tear down their universe and rebuild it every few years, just to give the writers more creative freedom and a new sandbox to play in. (Marvel essentially does the same thing, but they've scrapped the universe fewer times over the years - I guess since DC's been around longer, the more continuity you have, the more often you have to re-work it?)
So in a (relatively) recent comic-book event, Batman had the occasion to sit in this device called the Mobius Chair, usually used by a New Gods character named Metron - and the chair grants knowledge about the universe to the person sitting in it. Batman asked the chair to tell him Joker's real name, and Batman learned that there are really THREE Jokers - possibly the chair was counting the ones from the last two versions of the universe, but as yet we haven't received clarification on this. My point is, the Joker's origin is just like Batman's, it can be told every few years by different writers, and everyone who tackles it brings some new information to the table. And the new version is considered canonical until another writer decides to scrap that one and substitute his own.
What's important is for there to be a REASON to update the character's story, when you scrap the old one and start again. We've seen glimpses of the Joker's origin most notably in Detective Comics #168 in 1951, which told the story of how he began as a criminal called the Red Hood, and during a robbery at the Ace Chemical company (because we all know how much money chemical companies keep in their warehouses, right?) he was knocked into a vat of chemicals by Batman, and the fact that he was wearing a metal hood didn't help, and the chemicals turned his hair green and his skin white, ironically matching the Joker in the Ace chemical company's logo. This version of events fell out of favor at some point, but a version was revived for the 1988 graphic novel "The Killing Joke", only it added a bit about the character being a failed comedian who was coerced to put on the metal hood and participate in the robbery. (I'll get to the animated version of "The Killing Joke" in a couple of days...) This version of the origin was also tweaked a bit for the 1989 Tim Burton "Batman" film.
More time passed, and then things changed again - Fox-TV created the show "Gotham" which suggested new origins for many of Batman's prominent villains, so they could face off against police officer James Gordon in his 30's and a Bruce Wayne in his teens. They couldn't tackle the Joker directly for some reason, but there were strong indications that this anarchistic cult leader, Jerome Valeska, would ultimate fill the role - only then they killed him. But then they figured out a way to bring him back, then they killed him again. Finally they revealed he had a twin brother, Jeremiah, and set about possibly turning HIM into a Joker-like psycho-criminal mastermind.
So now that all brings me to "Joker", and in some ways we've come full circle - we're reverting back now to a version of the "Killing Joke" origin, where the future Joker is a failing comedian, only now we've added a boatload of mental problems and mother issues, plus another connection to the future Batman. Because Fleck's mother is also some form of crazy, and she used to work for Thomas Wayne, she's convinced herself that she once had a relationship with him, and that Arthur is Thomas' son. Now, it's very ballsy to put this out there, because if Bruce Wayne and the Joker are half-brothers, we've essentially got a whole new dynamic. Only it's probably not true if Mama Fleck is a looney-tune.
You know, I'm probably over-thinking this whole thing, that's what I tend to do. Maybe it's helpful to think of "Joker" as something of a cross between "The King of Comedy" and "Requiem for a Dream", which a bit of "The Purge" thrown in at the end. A lot of this comparison has to do with De Niro playing a talk-show host named Murray Franklin, and Fleck always watches this show with his mother, and he dreams about being a guest on the show. This ends up coming true after the show airs footage of Fleck bombing at a comedy club, so he makes it to the show, but it's really for the wrong reasons, it comes from a place of humiliation, and it's one more link in the chain of failure that makes up Fleck's life - or is it?
Fleck is so delusional at this point that he reminds me of Rupert Pupkin trying to get on the Jerry Langford show, and he's willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Only his life keeps getting worse and worse (this is the "Requiem for a Dream" part...) as he follows bad advice, takes too much medication, loses his therapy sessions due to financial cutbacks, and gets fired for bringing a gun to an appearance at a children's hospital.
Then they added a bit about Joker having some kind of weird neurological condition, where he laughs at inappropriate times, when nervous or scared, as an offshoot of Tourette's syndrome or something. Is this an actual medical condition? It's another part of the need to apologize for who Joker is, and I don't know, I think I maybe liked it a little better when he was just insane. This, combined with the fact that he becomes the poster child for some kind of "Occupy Gotham" movement, sort of chips away at who he is at the core, like when you add it all up he's not to blame for his psychotic actions, and that sort of feels like a cop-out. Thomas Wayne supposedly said something years ago about the average Gothamites being a "bunch of clowns" and that's a very creaky bridge that this film tries to cross - yet another attempt to suggest that somehow, the Joker created Batman, instead of the other way around.
Another cop-out is that we don't get to hear very much of his comedy routine at the club - partially because he's laughing so hard, there's that convenient nervous neurological condition again. Or it's also possible that some screenwriter just found it hard to write "bad jokes" - funny jokes are easier to write, I think, but to create ones that are a particular level of bad. Or so I suspect. I don't know why, but I imagined that before becoming the Joker, his comedic style would be more observational, like Stephen Wright or Mitch Hedberg. I guess that's just me, but that style of comedy would fit more with the symptoms of depression, right?
(Now if I were writing this film, I'd have Arthur Fleck perform at a comedy club called "The Laughter House" and then when his set bombed, he'd walk outside, spray-paint a big letter "S" in front of the name to change it to "Slaughter House", then he'd go back inside, lock the door and kill everyone inside. That's my love of wordplay, I suppose, but I think that this could have been a very dramatic moment.)
I don't know, maybe this is the Joker origin that this new decade deserves - even though the film is set way back in 1981. But the desire for attention on a talk show isn't all that different from some people's desire to find fame on social media, and then the "Eat the Rich" mobs at the end is very reminiscent of modern protests calling for economic equality. But still, this doesn't feel like the Joker I know, and that alone turns what should have been a Grand Slam idea into sort of an inside-the-park home run. Know what I mean? It's still a run, and the score still increases, I just have some questions about the process that got it there.
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Frances Conroy (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Glenn Fleshler (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Leigh Gill, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Josh Pais (last seen in "The Famly Fang"), Marc Maron (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Dante Pereira-Olson (last seen in "You Were Never Really Here"), Carrie Louise Putrello, Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Gary Gulman, Chris Redd (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Bryan Callen (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), Rocco Luna, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Hannah Gross, Frank Wood, Sam Morril, Carl Lundstedt, Michael Benz, Ben Warheit, with a cameo from Justin Theroux (last seen in "Mute"), and archive footage of Fred Astaire (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Charlie Chaplin (last seen in "The Great Dictator").
RATING: 7 out of 10 rambling journal entries
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