(The case for arguing that) Joker: Folie à Deux is good, actually

The first Joker movie, directed by Todd Phillips and staring Joaquin Phoenix as sad/mad/bad clown Arthur Fleck, came out in 2019. It made over a billion dollars at the box office and was held up by many fans as a shining example of what superhero movies could look like if they aspired to artistic greatness.

This past weekend, its sequel Joker: Folie à Deux came out. Phillips and Phoenix both returned, this time bringing along Lady Gaga as the Joker's comic book girlfriend Harley Quinn. By and large, people hate it. It has cratering review scores from both critics and fans, people are cussing it out all over online, and it's on track to earn significantly less money than the first movie despite costing nearly four times as much to make. That inflated budget is almost definitely due to hefty salaries for Phillips, Phoenix and Gaga, so I don't think it's entirely inappropriate to indulge in a spot of schadenfreude as the movie underperforms; had they spent as much on the sequel as they did on the original (and nothing about Folie à Deux itself suggests they couldn't), the movie would be profitable by now.

That said, the backlash feels overblown. I didn't particularly enjoy Joker: Folie à Deux; it's dreary, the musical numbers are uneven, and there's a nonsensical action turn towards the end. But some of these responses...IndieWire called the movie "blockbuster filmmaking as a form of collective punishment." Rolling Stone says the movie has a message for fans: "Go F-ck Yourselves." No Scoops Club asks if Phillips made the movie bad on purpose because he intended it to fail.

This feels like it goes beyond a sober evaluation of a film's pros and cons. This feels personal. This feels like a pile-on. And when that happens, the contrarian that lives in my brain wants to fight back. It wants to at least try and make a case that Joker: Folie à Deux is...good, actually.

Beware MAJOR SPOILERS for Joker: Folie à Deux below!

The main reason people seem upset with the movie has to do with its treatment of main character Arthur Fleck, aka the Joker. The first movie traced Arthur's rise from mentally ill outcast to gleeful agent of chaos. This being a Batman spinoff, I think a lot of people expected the sequel to take his journey the rest of the way, to turn him from an agent of chaos into the agent of chaos, the Clown Prince of Crime who's been making Batman's life a colorful living hell for nearly a century.

Instead, Folie à Deux doubles down on the Arthur we remember from the early parts of Joker: he's deluded, awkward and weak. Far from embracing the Joker persona, he comes to see it as a lodestone around his neck, weighing him down with expectations he can't meet. His emotional climax comes during his trial for murders he committed in the first movie; he's representing himself, and he confesses to the jury that there is no Joker; there's only him. His admirers, including Gaga's Harley Quinn, abandon him over this admission of fallibility. In the end, a random character credited as "Young Inmate" stabs Arthur in jail. As Arthur bleeds out, the young inmate gives himself a Glasgow Smile and laughs maniacally. The implication is that he will become the Joker of myth and legend we all know while Arthur will die ignominiously on that prison floor.

I understand why people would be upset by this turn of events: they came to see the Joker's mythic rise to power and got a story about a pitiful man burdened by infamy collapsing in on himself. But I do think the turns of the plot are in keeping with the story of the first movie. Arthur isn't a criminal mastermind. He isn't any kind of mastermind; he's a reactive wretch with an unstable life who takes out his frustrations in public and ends up getting lionized for it. Nothing suggests that this man would be capable of doing anything other than fading away, which is what happens in Folie à Deux.

Folie à Deux is internally consistent when it comes to this theme; the movie opens with an animated short about Arthur wrestling with his own shadow, which represents his reputation growing beyond his ability to control it. That's also reflected in the subplot where his lawyer tries to plead insanity by arguing that the Joker is a "shadow" persona that takes over and forces Arthur to do horrible things. The movie is about Arthur's identity crisis from start to finish.

Joker: Folie à Deux isn't good (actually), but it's better than its reputation

So that's me trying to make a case for Joker: Folie à Deux. And I can keep going: one compliment I can give it without reservation is that the cinematography by Lawrence Sher is luminously beautiful. There's minimal special effects and tons of gorgeous frames. For that reason alone, I think the movie deserves some props.

And I do think the film has a consistent vision of itself, and that it shouldn't be dragged this hard just because that vision doesn't match the one many fans had in their heads. Had Joker and Folie à Deux not been Batman spinoffs, had they not come with the burden of expectation we associate with an iconic character like the Joker, I think people would be a lot kinder.

But of course these movies are Batman spinoffs, there's no getting away from those expectations, and I don't blame anyone for being upset over what Phillips and his team delivered. I think the movie was trapped from the start. The first Joker managed to walk a tightrope; it was both a superhero spinoff and a gritty drama in the mold of Martin Scorsese's early work, a personal story about a lone malcontent who achieves a moment of dark transcendence. Joker probably didn't need a sequel, but the movie made over a billion dollars so it was all but inevitable. Phillips and company decided to continue the story they started rather than deliver the comic book epic fans wanted, and no one ended up happy.

Mind you, even taking into account everything I've said, Joker: Folie à Deux still has problems. So it's internally consistent thematically. And? That doesn't mean it isn't a drag to watch. It doesn't make Joaquin Phoenix any better of a singer. It doesn't excuse the out-of-nowhere action twist at the end. I think Joker: Folie à Deux falls short in several areas, but I think it's better than the screeds online would have you believe. I wonder if the movie will be reevaluated in a few years time, once we've stepped back from the furor and appreciate what it does well.

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