GETTING THE LAST LAUGH
Phoenix transforms into Joker
His long career has been marked by much weight lost and gained in the service of his craft, while working with some of the great directors and crafting memorable bad guys. I’m speaking of course of Robert De Niro, for it is his cinematic soul that brings Joker to life.
De Niro and director Martin Scorsese surely had no idea they were laying this film’s foundations, 43 years ago, when the actor played a mentally unstable, gun-obsessed loner in Taxi Driver. Nor did they likely give it much thought when they reteamed six years later for The King of Comedy, with De Niro as an unsuccessful standup who fixates on a talk-show host played by Jerry Lewis.
And yet here is De Niro, a spry 76-year-old, as a brusque late-night figure named Murray Franklin, who books Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck after seeing a video someone shot of him flailing and failing ignominiously at a Gotham comedy club. (“Check out this joker,” he says by way of introduction. Arthur asks him to uppercase the J.) Arthur has long dreamt of being on Murray’s show — literally so in one scene that finds him half-asleep in front of the TV and hallucinating his way inside.
OK, I’ll grant that Phoenix’s performance is also strong.
Arthur is a socially awkward citizen, living with his mother (Frances Conroy), crushing on his single-mom neighbour (Zazie Beetz) but unsure what to do about it, and working as a rent-a-clown, which involves everything from hospital appearances to holding going-out-of-business signs.
Going out of business looks to be a growth industry in Gotham, which combines the worst bits of mid-century New York, including subway graffiti, rampant muggings, failing social services and a garbage strike to rival the one in ’68. Production designer Mark Friedberg has worked on Autumn in New York and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, so his N.Y. cred is solid. And there’s a great, cello-heavy score by Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir, who has worked with Denis Villeneuve on Arrival, Prisoners and Sicario, and probably wishes she were old enough to have been part of the Jaws theme.
But the real behind-the-camera surprise is the director,
Todd Phillips, who for the past 10 years stopped making Hangover movies only long enough to make the road-trip comedy Due Date with most of the same cast. He also made 2000’s Road Trip. And, OK, 2016’s dark comedy War Dogs.
But that darkness has nothing on Joker, which is R-rated — like Deadpool, but not for the same silly/naughty reasons. It heaps derision, scorn and misfortune on Arthur until you wonder how he can handle any more.
Of course, he soon can’t. We know where Arthur’s going to end up, even if we don’t know the precise route. And what a film Joker would be if it were sprung on audiences unawares, without a half-century of clownish baggage courtesy of everyone from Cesar Romero to Jared Leto.
But every generation gets its own Joker. Jack Nicholson’s was acid-dipped into his perpetually grinning mug. Phoenix’s wears simple face paint, but carries his own psychic scars in the form of a Tourette’s-like condition that causes him to vomit out laughter at inopportune times. He even carries a little card to alert people, although (A) it shouldn’t require a “MORE ON BACK” flip-over and (B) he really should produce it at the first sign of trouble, not the third or fourth.
I don’t mean this to sound like victim blaming, though that is what happens to Arthur through most of the movie. Gotham’s a rough town, the thinking seems to go, and people should tough it out or get out.
Trouble is, Arthur has nowhere to go but down, especially after coming to a troubling conclusion about billionaire mayoral candidate Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), who had briefly employed his mom.
Wayne violently rejects this accusation. (He also has a legitimate son, Bruce, with whom you may be familiar.)
Like riders on a nihilistic seesaw, as Arthur goes down, Joker ascends. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a scene set to Gary Glitter’s 1972 hit Rock and Roll, in which Joker dances on a long set of stairs on which Arthur has previously trudged every day.
The scene in question follows one the film’s sudden explosion of graphic violence. Soft-shoeing on the stairs, Phoenix looks almost skeletal, so much weight did he lose for the role. But he’s added something intangible for the scene, something that completes the transformation of his character. It’s disturbing, but you can’t take your eyes off him. cknight@postmedia.com
Todd Phillips wants to get something out of the way really quickly, just so there’s no confusion. He isn’t a huge comic book guy.
Phillips, who co-writes and directs Joker, was keen to tackle the Batman villain because if there’s one thing he’s been interested in throughout his whole artistic life, it’s mayhem.
“I always was attracted to the Joker character,” he says.
“I liked his representation of mayhem and when I started thinking about comic book movies in general, and how they’re spectacular and gigantic and how they have the world’s attention, I just started thinking about how you could really use that genre in a different way.”
So along with co-writer Scott Silver, Phillips, 48, who became a household name after directing the three Hangover movies, Old School, Starsky & Hutch and War Dogs, pitched Warner Bros. a standalone origin tale for one of comicdom’s most iconic characters.
Q Working on a film like Joker comes with a lot of fan expectations. How did you deal with that going into the film?
A I had no experience with something like this. The closest experience I had to expectations like this was Hangover II. With that, we were following up a massive hit. But I didn’t have experience with the comic book audience, who with every nugget they hear there’s a debate about it for four days on Twitter. So it was an overwhelming experience to run that gauntlet, so to speak.
Q How did you settle in on Joaquin Phoenix for your lead? So far in his career, he has avoided these types of films.
A I’ve been a fan of Joaquin forever. His performances over the years have been jaw-dropping. I knew he’d be a hard person to get because we all know the kinds of films he gravitates toward. It’s not like Joaquin doesn’t get offered big movies, he just chooses to do the movies he wants to do. So for me and Scott that was the challenge. We had to write something that he couldn’t say no to.
Q The movie is influenced by ’70s crime dramas and you cast Robert De Niro, whose DNA is in a lot of those titles, including Taxi Driver. How did he react to what you were doing? He too is an actor who hasn’t done any comic book films.
A He doesn’t — that’s a great point. Every move we made with this movie, every time we would get stuck, we always asked ourselves, ‘What’s the bold choice here?’ and if not bold choice, ‘What’s the weird choice?’ With De Niro, it was, ‘What’s the bold choice?’ We sent it to him and he read it and dug it and got it. He was into it as it references Rupert Pupkin, the character he plays in King of Comedy, but that’s not why he did it. I think he dug what the movie was ultimately saying.
Q Phoenix goes to some pretty dark places with Arthur/Joker. Were you surprised at his fearlessness as an actor?
A People have asked me: what’s the one event that turns him into Joker? There is no one event. When you watch the movie, it’s this slow transformation. I compare it on a stereo going from 1 to 11. You turn the knob up slow, slow, slow … it’s a slow burn. The whole movie we’re turning that knob and Joaquin is slowing ratcheting up a little more and a little more. I just think it’s a masterful performance from him. He’s just wild.
Q Among all comic book villains, Joker is one of the most feared and revered. Why does he endure?
A I think it’s because he represents this anarchic spirit that’s in everybody, but we don’t act on it because we’re normal. There’s something about him not caring at all. One of the things I loved about (Heath Ledger’s Joker), I loved his attitude: He just wants to watch the world burn. Personally, I don’t want to watch the world burn, but I like that character’s attitude. He wasn’t after money, he wasn’t after women, he just wanted to f--- s--up. He wanted chaos, and there’s something about Joker being this agent of chaos that I think is exciting to watch.