The indifferent response to Joker: Folie à Deux over the past week suggests the mass audience has come around to the (correct) point of view that - despite the initial praise, box office and awards - 2019's Joker was garbage, and spending any additional time in the world it set up would do no good whatsoever for anybody's mental health. (I know I bang on about the dysfunction of modern multiplex cinema, but - seriously - Joaquin Phoenix does the work he's done for the past fifteen years, and winds up winning the Oscar for that? C'mon c'mon.) To Todd Phillips' credit, he's used the first film's success not to double down exactly, but to experiment or mix up his meds. Where Joker bore out the suicidal tendencies of latter-day studio filmmaking, resembling the endpoint of a decades-long downward spiral, Folie à Deux is altogether more schizophrenic, which is to say it still requires approaching with caution. It opens with an animated recap of the story so far, drawn in a flat, ugly impersonation of the Looney Tunes house style (by the long-lost Sylvain Chomet, no less), then catches up with Phoenix's newly skeletal Arthur Fleck as he endures the institutional indignities of Arkham Asylum. As this Joker awaits trial for the events of film one, Phillips floats a love story, nudging the reticent Fleck into a nurturing relationship with some variant of the character known as Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga); and, as you've doubtless already heard, this bad romance has also been couched as a musical of some description, presumably as Phillips believed this was the wildest and most extreme thing he could do with these characters at this juncture. By now, you may have puzzled out why Folie à Deux has underperformed as it has. Having courted the incel crowd first time out, who just want confirmed what they already presume to know, Phillips has returned with exactly the last sort of film that demographic might get enthused about: the auteurist art movie. One of the few truly funny aspects of Joker 2 is how it encourages you to imagine the successive waves of outrage and revulsion passing through certain message boards as details of the new film emerge. Joker doesn't go apeshit on anyone for ninety minutes (and then only in a dream sequence)? You're kidding me. Arthur Fleck kisses a male fellow inmate? Ugh, gross. His lady love interest is played by the ultra-woke Gaga? Go jump off a tall building, or words to that effect.
Those of us who didn't need the first film, let alone a sequel - who felt all along that this franchise was only ever the dregs of a bad idea, namely turning the movie mainstream over to superheroes and the whims of sadolescents - might begrudgingly admire this search for variation. There is, certainly, a smidgen of novelty in hearing Phoenix, with his cracked, Silk Cut Sinatra voice, sing his heart out rather than merely smiling and murdering as he smiles. The prevailing idea is that these vintage standards ("Get Happy", "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" et al.) offer us deeper access to Arthur Fleck, that they render him more human, even vulnerable than the stand-up's patter of film one. But, really, how much depth is there to be found in a void? We're mostly watching another over-extended study of a sociopathic miseryguts whose uppermost characteristic is a mopey self-pity; you may as well centre a franchise on Morrissey, for heaven's sake. Desiccated and drained of any obvious charisma, Phoenix is once more afforded plentiful opportunity to showboat, yet Folie à Deux makes for a stodgy, stopstart musical. An early nod to Cherbourg's colourful umbrellas is soon eclipsed by the blue-grey filters of superhero stock; nothing here has the vim and verve of Jack Nicholson conducting an art heist to the throbs of a Prince bassline. It's weird that Phillips' characters keep referring disparagingly to a TV movie of Fleck's life, when that's what this sequel most often recalls, right through to its climactic courtroom non-drama. Gaga can at least hold a tune, but any chemistry between the leads is minimal: there's no indication of why she might be attracted to this slumpy chump, beyond the assertion this is all long-established DC lore. This Harley Quinn duly takes her place among a roster of flatly defined secondary characters. Brendan Gleeson, apparently morphing into Charles Durning, is the asylum guard who might have been a weight-throwing antagonist in an earlier draft; Catherine Keener, as Fleck's lawyer, gets early release for good behaviour as her client commandeers proceedings; 34th pick Harry Lawtey (of TV's Industry) wears a suit as Harvey "Zero Personality" Dent; and Steve Coogan (whose American accent may finally be the best thing here) turns up as a tabloid TV interviewer whose presence hints that Phillips saw Folie à Deux as his Natural Born Killers. (It's one of several ideas - Joker pregnancies! A Joker Liberation Front! - dropped almost as soon as they're taken up.) Even at the time, the first movie seemed a weird sort of entertainment for a Hollywood studio to be peddling, but then those were the Trump years: generally pretty weird. The sequel arrives at some awareness that this is a weird sort of entertainment - but the audience, being broadly smarter than the movies credit, have clearly sussed this and stayed away in droves. The residual fear is that an already lamentably risk-averse system uses Folie à Deux's failure as an excuse to throw the remains of the baby out with the stagnant bathwater. Yet the trick is not to stop making auteurist art movies. The trick is to ensure the Todd Phillipses of this world don't get to make auteurist art movies.
Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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