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Joker: Folie À Deux

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Bob Hoose
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Movie Review

Arthur Fleck is the Joker!

At least that’s what the cheering throngs in the street think. He’s a chaotic anti-hero to them. A man who screams in the face of authority and blows out someone’s brains on national TV. This clown-painted misfit represents every angst-filled shriek they keep bottled up inside.

Arthur, on the other hand, feels none of that. He wears no clown face. He’s just a rail-thin, broken man who’s dragged near-naked out of his cell each day to dump out his pot of urine. He’s heavily drugged, empty and drifting numbly toward an approaching death sentence.

He murdered five people, after all. Six, if you count his mother.

But then Arthur meets a woman named Lee as he’s dragged through the nearby psychiatric asylum. They talk. They bond over parental abuse. Her eyes glow with manic adoration. And a frail, broken man walks away … with a song in his heart.

Sure, his trial is days away. It’s an open-and-shut case. But music is his hiding place, an escape. It lifts the hellish up to the level of merely painful. It, like love, can even give this husk of a slightly psychotic man a reason to look forward, not down. And Arthur is suddenly filled with music.

That music may be discordant at times. It may bleed into a minor key. But it’s better that the sour-breathed chortles of the heavy-handed guards and the constant waul of Arthur’s onrushing death.

Perhaps there’s a way. The doctors who interviewed him gave him the right words to say, the right psychosis to wear. That and Lee’s eyes and voice could be enough. And when she begins singing with Arthur in his mental musicals, Arthur is sure.

They want a killer to sing at trial. The Joker will croon.


Positive Elements

There’s not much positive to point to here. You might say that the most redemptive element of this story is the suggestion that love can change someone in good ways, even in the face of great pain.

However, the film also clearly says that society lauds the mentally broken, and that we are victims of the very abuse that we often allow and promote. In that sense, the violent, psychotic behavior on display here plays out as a cautionary note that calls for correction. (Though no hint is given regarding what that correction might entail, I should add.)

It’s also implied that the social media that drives our society tends to enflame the worst part of us.

Spiritual Elements

One of the prison guards cracks a joke about a funeral for a “Catholic” dog. Someone calls out: “I’m being serious; on the Bible.”

Sexual & Romantic Content

It’s not sexualized, but at the beginning of the film, male prisoners are called out of their cells. Some are naked (one of whom we see briefly, though without seeing anything critical), while others are dressed only in briefs. They all shuffle down a hallway to a grimy bathroom.

Arthur drops his pants, and he and Lee have sex in his cell. They’re clothed and leaning up against a wall. She later reports to him that she’s pregnant. The prison guards send a young inmate to Arthur for a kiss. Arthur kisses him obediently. Lee and Arthur kiss several times. Arthur kisses his female lawyer (much to her chagrin.)

We see a chest-up shot of Lee wearing only a bra as she puts on her makeup. On a city street, a sign advertises a “peep show.”

Violent Content

The film opens with a Warner Brothers cartoon in the style of a 1960s short. In it, the Joker’s shadow kisses and accosts a woman and kills several men, while the real Joker is pummeled and left staggering about in his underwear.

We see much of the above later reflected in the dark and grimy “real world” as the incredibly frail Arthur is beaten by guards and thumped around while dressed in skimpy, shredded undergarments. The guards not only beat and pummel Arthur whenever he earns their ire (in one case ripping off his suit and pounding his head into a urinal), they also slam other prisoners into walls and head-first onto tabletops, too. In one instance, a guard angrily chokes a young man until he dies.

The film shows Arthur finding a bit of escape through imagined musical numbers. (In turn, movie viewers get a bit of escape, too, from the constant heavy darkness of the film’s story.) Those sequences, however, don’t mask the mess on display or keep this pic from being very emotionally disturbing.

In and out of imaginary visions we see people bloodily shot and stabbed in the stomach and head, a prone judge’s head is mulched with a court gavel, and a lawyer is bashed repeatedly by a stool. Someone is badly wounded and left to bleed out on the floor while his attacker slashes his own throat. A woman smears the blood of a victim across her mouth. Several people lift pistols to their own temples. And in one case, someone pulls the trigger. A car bomb rips open the side of a building, leaving many dead and others badly bloodied.

After that car-bomb attack, the streets are awash in fire and carnage. Someone notes that people are going to burn the whole city down. And in that light, Lee sets a fire that eventually engulfs an entire hospital. She also smashes out a store window and steals a portable TV.

We hear about Arthur being sexually abused as a seven-year-old. And several characters attest to the emotional scars inflicted by  witnessing a brutal murder.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear more than 40 f-words and about a half-dozen s-words mixed in with uses of “a–” and “a–hole.” God’s name and Jesus’ name are both profaned (and the former is twice paired with “d–n”). We see a crude hand gesture.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Arthur smokes profusely throughout the film (even in court), as do Lee and others. (Lee even inhales Arthur’s exhaled smoke in a show of intimacy.) Arthur and other inmates swallow pills designed to keep them drugged and complacent. (We see the drug’s sense-numbing effects.)

Other Noteworthy Elements

Lee lies about nearly everything. So it’s hard to know when anything she says is actually the truth. It’s clear, however, that her desire for Arthur is driven by his Joker infamy. A guard asks Arthur for his autograph in the hope of making money “after they fry his a–.” Arthur signs the book: “I hope you get cancer.”

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a superhero or comic book movie, this isn’t it. In fact, this raw-edged film takes pleasure in rubbing viewers’ noses in all the mentally and physically broken reasons why it’s not the movie that comic book fanboys might be looking for.

That said, Joker: Folie à Deux is likely not what anyone will go in expecting, thanks in large part to director Todd Phillips’ clever cinematic packaging and his lead actors’ skills. The filmmakers take the story’s darkly tragic and utterly disturbing examination of violent psychosis and wrap it in … musical theater.

That may sound ridiculous, but it arguably lightens the harsh and horrible things shown on screen. And in a way, it might help to keep some viewers from tumbling into their own dark depression as this tale unfolds.

Still, this is not a film for the faint of heart. It is incredibly foul, violently bloody and emotionally disturbing. Its murk sticks to you and stays with you like an extra thick layer of greasepaint and blood spatter.

And that’s no joke.


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Bob Hoose

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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