Five years after the premiere of Todd Phillips’s Joker, a bleak reimagining of Batman’s most enduring enemy, the Venice Film Festival has once again welcomed the clown prince of crime to its shores. He arrives with a sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, a fantasy musical laden with expectation. The first Joker won the top prize here in Venice, on its way to huge box office returns and an Oscar for its lead actor, Joaquin Phoenix. I don’t see a similar future in store for Folie à Deux.
This time around, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is no longer free to roam Gotham as a lonely, murderous sad sack. He is festering in Arkham Asylum, awaiting a court date should he be deemed mentally fit to stand trial. A burgeoning fandom cheers on his cause from the outside, while ambitious prosecutor Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) mounts his case that Arthur is a ruthless killer—not, as Arthur’s supporters believe, an avatar of the common people who finally snapped when confronted with too much of the rot and predation and hypocrisy of the world.
Those hoping that a Joker sequel would be about the newly minted villain wreaking havoc across his city will be mightily disappointed by Folie à Deux. Phillips has banished us to essentially two places: the asylum and the courthouse. Very little happens beyond those walls, reducing the film to cramped psychodrama. It’s startlingly dull, a pointless procedural that seems to disdain its audience.
Yes, there are musical interludes, meant to rapturously illustrate the dawning love between Arthur and Harleen Quinzel, a fellow mental patient played by nascent movie star Lady Gaga. In the months leading up to the film’s premiere, it was fascinating to watch anticipation for Folie à Deux grow among those who had no care for the first Joker. The promise of Gaga is just that strong; her presence suggested something big and gregarious and more broadly accessible, inviting in those who were maybe alienated from Joker’s grim vision of lonely straight male rage.
Gaga is certainly in Folie à Deux, and she does sing—either at a controlled belt in the reverie sequences, or in a scratchy flutter when Lee (as she’s called here) and Arthur are closer to lucidity. But she is woefully underused, her character acting as mere emissary of Arthur’s acolytes, there to prove that the attention of women is fleeting and conditional. Phillips sneers at the idea that Lee could ever truly love someone like Arthur. She ultimately comes across as a fickle creature who can’t abide the real truth of a man.
Lady Gaga singing in a movie should never be drab, and yet Phillips wrings nearly every ounce of life out of these moments of song, a jukebox assemblage of standards from roughly the middle of the last century. A merry “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” sung while Arthur and Lee first break bad together, is the only bit of transporting whimsy or sentiment to be found in the film.
Phoenix seems just as nihilistically checked-out. His singing voice is serviceable but smugly unrefined. Even when he lets loose one of Arthur’s signature laughs—caustic, high-pitched howls that were effectively creepy in the first film—it resounds only as rote obligation. Nothing in Folie à Deux could genuinely inspire such a raw outburst of feeling.
A swooning criminal romance Folie à Deux is not. So what is it? It is not insightful about mental illness nor criminal tendency. It barely articulates what it is to fall into obsessive love. The politics of the film are too lazy and inexact to even qualify as libertarian. Mostly, Folie à Deux plays as a middle finger to anyone who sought something meaningful in it. I won’t spoil anything specific, but I will say that the ending of the film—which is the first time anything truly happens in the whole movie—is bound to enrage even the most die-hard of Joker believers.
Maybe Folie à Deux’s aversion to satisfying expectations is purposeful. It is possible that Phillips is trying to lay waste to the entire franchise economy, arguing that all of this origin-story noodling, this gritty-ing up of comic-book pulp is a silly business. That may be the only explanation for why Phillips torpedos the legacy he created five years ago. Maybe he is the true Joker of these films, torching everything because nothing really matters in the end.
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