Fiercely embattled with itself, Joker: Folie à Deux is contrarian filmmaking at its core, and in its most gruesome joke of all, makes a mockery of its own existence. Self sabotage is rare at this level, but Todd Philips so wants to be the enfant terrible of comic book films that he’s now directing a half musical, half self-implosion as though held at gunpoint. The very existence of Folie à Deux feels loaded with tension and ready to disintegrate into nothingness. If comic book movies are too typical and too design-by-committee, finally one has swung too far the other direction, saying to hell with the committee or basic principles of how to develop a story or make things work on-screen. Unwrite the rules, or just discard them, because Folie à Deux has abandoned all reason.
Irrational filmmaking is a choice. What kind of movie would the Joker himself direct? Surely one as tortured and anti-comedy as this grim parable. The clown, now imprisoned at Arkham Asylum, is disempowered. The new Joker is pathetic and sad. If you care, the movie will punish you for it.
Joaquin Phoenix makes it easy to get invested. His presence is nuanced and has more to in small moments than the entire movie has on its mind. There’s no driving force here, although it should be the encounters with Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn, her existence is most successfully used for singing parts.
When Folie à Deux breaks into song — and it does this all the time — it never advances the characters or stories. Nothing is learned than what we have already gathered about them. If anything, we must unlearn about the Joker from the last film and accept this grim, new reality. The songs are also torturous, because Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga are both so capable.
The film rapidly dissolves into nonsense. Vapors of plot hang in the air. Nothing connects. None of the ideas build to a larger scheme. This is directly oppositional filmmaking. The film is in direct opposition to Joker (2019), throwing away both the good and the bad, starting over from an empty place, very clearly the end of this specific thing, Joaquin Phoenix in comic book movies was always an exception, not something meant to last.
Folie à Deux is painful to watch. It does not develop normally. Nothing much of interest really happens from start to end. One idea does not especially lead to the next. There are fragments of ideas, specific moments where Joaquin Phoenix is being really interesting or Lady Gaga is singing beautifully, but any quality is so compartmentalized, so restricted and singular, that none of the good ideas contribute anything holistically. Folie à Deux is no laughing matter.