How Joker: Folie à Deux fully embraces The Last Jedi
By confronting its own fanbase head-on, the Joker sequel sees Todd Phillips walk in the footsteps of Rian Johnson. Fans are, yet again, totally furious.
Joker: Folie à Deux is really a question of Hollywood priorities
When one character says “all we had was the fantasy, and you gave up” in the second half of Joker: Folie à Deux, they are unwittingly providing a review of the film. The only thing this sequel has going for it, from the Looney Tunes intro to the enjoyable button-push of a final twist, is its fascinating relationship with reality. This is a movie about Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) struggling between what he really is and what the world wants him to be as he prepares to face the music for his crimes in the first film.
And face the music he does because, contrary to what everyone involved in the movie has been desperately trying to tell you for the last six months, this is a musical. But weirdly, it’s a musical that seems a little too ashamed of itself to ever fully commit to the level of song-and-dance fantasia that could have made it genuinely exciting. It’s got one foot stuck in its own past — a foot that it should’ve dramatically sawed off like Cary Elwes in a serial killer’s grubby bathroom.
Perhaps powered by its own identity crisis, Joker: Folie à Deux is struggling. It’s floundering at the box office, looks unlikely to match its predecessor as an Oscars presence, and has caused quite the shit-fit in the first film’s fervent fan base.1 In its second weekend at the multiplex, it’s not even the most popular film about a killer clown at the US box office.
All of this made me think about another massively divisive blockbuster: 2017’s perennial social media discourse machine Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
The Last Jedi had a provocative, unusual relationship with the history of its franchise — a relationship that proved a bridge too far for some viewers. Rian Johnson is as big a Star Wars fan as anybody, but he decided that the best way to take the franchise forward was to twist and comment on that past.2 In that movie, Kylo Ren says: “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be.” Many have taken that as an overt mission statement on the film’s behalf, but the film is actually a more optimistic take than that — a broadening out of The Force.
Joker: Folie à Deux, similarly, seeks to play with the world established in the first film and, more specifically, the way the movie was received off-screen. If Joker (2019) is about the birth of a legend, Folie à Deux is about the harsh fire hose of cold water presented by reality.
This is, in a way, something to be applauded. It feels as if director Todd Phillips was frustrated by the way his movie was received, both by the press and by some of its most devoted fans — those who turned a man responsible for six deaths into a twisted anti-hero. Folie à Deux is, on paper, a repudiation of its predecessor’s place in the world and the discourse. The problem is that, unlike the first one, it lacks the courage of its convictions.3
The musical element is the best manifestation of this. Phillips plays, at best, minimal lip service to the reasons why Arthur and his new prison lover Lee (Lady Gaga) retreat into song. There’s some reference to how Arthur heard music around his previous murders — there was certainly a theatricality to him last time around — and there’s also a clear diegetic element created by his meet-cute with Lee happening at a singing group for Arkham residents. But mostly, the music is just sort of… there.
The choice of songs feels almost entirely random, as if shuffling listlessly through a “Great American Songbook” playlist on Spotify. There’s also a clear hierarchy of the musical numbers based on how far into fantasy the characters have travelled. If the performance is taking place in the real world, Phoenix and Gaga warble tunelessly through it in the name of what passes for realism. If it’s existing in one of several Technicolor fantasy realms, then Gaga in particular is given licence to show off her incredible pipes. The latter group is by far the best and creates the only scenes where Phillips and returning cinematographer Lawrence Sher showcase any sort of visual flair and pizazz — in contrast to the first film’s admirably scuzzy Gotham streets.
None of these elements matter in your average musical. The existence of songs can go unremarked upon. But Joker: Folie à Deux is so ashamed of its own musicality that it feels the need to at least wave a hand towards explaining it. Either go the whole hog and make a musical or don’t make one at all. This sort of hinterland helps nobody and angers both audiences. There must be a Venn diagram middle section of people who love both edgelord internet philosophy and visual nods to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but you need a microscope to find it.
The problem with Joker: Folie à Deux is that it wants to find that middle section and spends most of its running time pissing off either one of those broader groups or the other. This speaks to the conundrum in Hollywood that has been rumbling since the great “Last Jedi Wars” of 2017: how much should filmmakers give the fans what they want, and how much do fans actually know what that is?4
Two things were clear from the moment Joker first hit cinemas in 2019. Firstly, they were absolutely going to have to make a sequel. You don’t get to make a billion-dollar one-and-done in the comic book space. The second thing, though, was that neither Phoenix or Phillips was going to stick around for the sequel unless they were given the headroom to do something very different with the character and the world.
When you watch the finished product, it’s clear that there was a degree of push-and-pull at play. Everyone involved was aware that fans wanted more of the same, but they were equally determined to deliver something different. The idea of taking an already very different superhero movie and turning it into a full-blooded musical is a genuinely brilliant one — especially with a powerhouse like Lady Gaga on board — but this one feels as if it stopped at that idea phase. They decided to make a musical, then went off for an early lunch to bask in their genius, without working out how and why they wanted to incorporate the music.
The result is a deeply hollow experience that emerges as the worst of both worlds, at least until that savage final twist. Fans of musicals will hate its clear lack of understanding of the genre, while the first film’s adherents will be left scratching their heads at why the narrative seems as if it was specifically designed to make them feel like idiots. In the end, no one is happy. If there’s a Star Wars comparison to be made, it’s probably The Rise of Skywalker. Even the Joker isn’t smiling after that.
Joker: Folie à Deux is in UK cinemas now.
The film got a D average rating via CinemaScore, which is the lowest ever grade for a comic book movie. For context, the lowest ever MCU scores were a B for The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Eternals. Even Megalopolis, which is by far the worst movie of this year, managed a D+.
As Rian Johnson told a very handsome film journalist back in 2018: “Having grown up as a Star Wars fan, I know that anything that comes out and tries something interesting is going to get pushback, because I’ve pushed back against stuff when at first I was like ‘what is that?’ So I get that. But, for me, I always felt very confident that the decisions we made in the movie were coming from the right place and were the right decisions that honoured the characters and honoured the story.”
Say what you like about the first Joker, and I’m no big fan of it, but it can’t be accused of pulling punches.