Crazy, disturbing brilliance of Phoenix demands an Oscar for his role in Joker
Actor gives the character a seductive, new, delirious definition to crazy in writer-director Phillips’ movie
The red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff), which leads up to the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, is stained with dashed hopes and splatters of blood ’n’ sweat of actors who gave their all to a role but got nothing in return, because the film carrying them just wasn’t worth it.
One year on it still bothers me that Nicole Kidman gave one of the best performances of the year, and her career, in Destroyer (director Karyn Kusama’s nonsensical 2018 film), and didn’t even get a nomination. While not to undermine Olivia Colman’s performance in The Favourite, which won the Oscar for best actress in February this year, the sad fact is that Kidman’s portrayal of the drunk and crabby detective Erin Bell in Destroyer is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime role usually reserved to resurrect the careers of male staractors who may be getting on in years and, thus, getting by on two-bit roles. It’s the kind of actor-driven project that big studios invest in to allow an actor to revisit an archetype so that they can strut their stuff while redefining it. Nicole Kidman went above and beyond, yet was cruelly ignored.
But Joaquin Phoenix, 44, may well have got the jury of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences by the collar. It’s not going be to easy for them to deny him the Oscar for Best Performance, Male, for his role in and as Joker.
In writer-director Todd Phillips’ Joker, which tells the standalone origin story of Batman’s iconic arch-nemesis and played at Tiff, Phoenix has given a seductive, new, delirious definition to crazy. Phoenix’s Joker is not just a stunning, scary rendition of the comic-book everyday man disregarded by society, and his gradual decent as anti-hero, but it’s the sort of performance that becomes a benchmark for future actors to aspire to.
Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is an aspiring stand-up comedian who keeps a rather disturbing journal of his thoughts and jokes but doesn’t have the funnies
because he’s a man born to misery. Reduced to earn a living by dressing up as a clown for hire, the socially awkward man who lives with his mother and often has to rehearse simple interactions before he can play-act them, finds it easy to converse with his gun than talk when all the strings tying him feebly to normalcy get snapped one by one.
If Phoenix is bypassed and the golden statuette goes to another, it will be only because Phillips’ film aspires to but never really rises to match his performance. Joker is more a Bgrade beauty than a film in the league of Christopher Nolan’s very noir The Dark Night Trilogy. Joker dwells in the grungy neighbourhoods with stinking gutters outside Batman’s
Wayne mansion. And while Phoenix as joker manages to rise, Joker
do a menacing jig, calling attention to his swing and sway, the film doesn’t. That’s because the film is not really an entity by itself. It exists only as a performing stage for Phoenix. Written by Phillips and Scott Silver, Joker’s script is a convoluted mess of too many things that amount to very little. At one level, it gives Fleck a string of miseries as reasons to go ballistic, at another it tries to create a political context where the raging, rampaging joker finds resonance among other residents of Gotham city who are battling “super rats” and a rising crime graph. In between all this are Arthur Fleck’s own, random, psychotic acts of sudden, horrific violence. All these threads exist, but Joker is not able to bring them together in a seamless narrative that makes sense. But, as a framing device that’s entirely in the service of Phoenix’s histrionics, it works. Phoenix is on screen for the entirety of the movie, and Lawrence Sher, the cinematographer, repeatedly captures him in shots that are iconic. His camera admires, savours and showcases Phoenix, along with ominous, foot-taping music that announces and then celebrates Phoenix’s solo acts of madness — especially his dance on the steps and a bloody scene at his house. The film’s soundtrack feels as if large, coarse chunks of the universe are realigning themselves to make way for a gathering, murderous storm.
It often seems as if Joker’s entire team was dedicated to clearing all scenes and frames of any intervention — other actors, characters, things — that would distract from Phoenix’s singular act of joyous derangement. Barring Robert de Niro, who plays Murray Franklin, a talkshow host Arthur Fleck is drawn to, there is no other supporting performance in Joker that Phoenix can jam with.
Though Phoenix here steps into a role that has been, in the past, played memorably by Jack Nicholson (in Tim Burton’s The Batman), and Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight), and his Joker, born out of victimhood and vainglory, may well be the true successor to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle (in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver), but this Joker is his own creation.
Phoenix, who lost 24 kgs for the role and learnt how to apply his own, joker’s make-up, is a creature made up of dry, pokey bones sheathed rather callously by a thin sheet of skin. There’s a hint of queer in Phoenix’s walk, talk and demeanour, and a worrying frailty to his frame.
Phoenix uses his body, eyes, face, hair to create a portrait of a man spiralling into criminal madness. In one scene, right at the beginning, he is able to conjure and convey a rising degree of menace, as if evil is incubating while holding a stopwatch. There needed to be some more, intelligent exploration of his particular brand of crazy, but the film leaves that job almost entirely to Phoenix.
Reportedly, director Todd Phillips’ great piece of advice to Joaquin Phoenix while he was getting ready to play Joker was, “Let’s just be bold. Let’s do something.” Phoenix did. Phillips just recorded it.