‘Joker’ Review: A must-watch Joaquin Phoenix character study with a lot to unpack

“Joker” is an intellectual minefield that won’t leave your mind alone until the next morning. 

“Are you having any negative thoughts?” — a psychiatrist fearfully asks the mentally ill titular character Arthur Fleck, played masterfully by Joaquin Phoenix. But somehow the question eerily extends itself out to the audience, beckoning them into his fractured mind. 

Directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, the film does far from what some fans have claimed it to do: dismissing murder, embodying super-villains as heroes, enabling the most gruesome of thoughts. It isn’t a blueprint to rise up and fight back. It’s a marvelous, ponderous reminder of society’s potential for overextension.  

But above all else, “Joker” is a must-watch movie of two minds. On one hand, it paints the NYC-esque Gotham City as heaven for the rich and hell for the poor — on the other, it suggests a fantasy which accepts violence and sees it as the route to escape from the common man’s struggle. Both come together to create an extraordinary film about the duality of man, the role society can play in a distressed life and the decline of a battered mind toeing the edge of sanity. 

Ironically, this isn’t a film about the Joker — it’s a film about Arthur, and how he might become the Joker. Arthur is a man who writes jokes, but can’t make a good one to save his life. He’s a seemingly content, for-rent clown twirling signs in the street. 

But he also hallucinates, suffers from chronic, uncontrollable bursts of laughter and has severe delusions of grandeur. His mental illness prevents him from his aspirations, and even a normal life. He tried stand-up comedy — he’d always wanted to — only to be made fun of on national television by his idol, a late-night talk show host. 

It doesn’t help that he’s held together by the thinnest of strings, with the first show of emotion by a woman prompting him to secretly follow her for a day. “Joker” follows this troubled life of Arthur’s, and all of the dreams that seem tenable to him, but are known to be unreachable by the audience, like a career in comedy and bringing smiles to the world.  

And then it slowly rips those dreams apart, one by one, and explores what an ill, broken spirit might do in a crime-ridden city like Gotham. The title gives you an idea of what that could be — the Joker is perhaps the most famous, murderous comic book villain of all time — but it almost certainly won’t play out exactly as you’d expect.  

*photo courtesy of IMDB

Phoenix showcases the perfect psychological ticks and tendencies to show how, and gives enough innocence to understand why someone like Arthur could take a darker turn in Gotham. Arthur, in a manner akin to Alan Moore’s classic 1988 graphic novel, “Batman: The Killing Joke,” has always been one bad day away from lunacy. 

Phoenix never lets the audience forget about the instability from the moment he trades the book of dark jokes for a revolver, all the way up to the film’s incredible 30-minute crescendo of a finale. At this point, Phoenix is easily top dog for an Oscar. 

Arthur often reminisces and fantasizes, and his fantasies intersect with reality at certain points. It leaves you with the unique realization that you might not know which was which. What actually happened?  Remarkably, the possibilities are numerous. Arthur’s reliability as a narrator is as shaky as the morals he begins to let go of, since every scene never really leaves his perspective or viewpoint. 

Yet even as a fantasy, the most concerning and brilliant revelation of the film is how close the world of reality seems to be to Gotham. The world of “Joker” — and yes, the world of a young Bruce Wayne — feels just a shot away from ours, but remains far enough to ponder the possibility of it, not fear it. And characters like Arthur are reflections of the most extreme.

*photo courtesy of IMDB

And “Joker” strays far from any comic book movie trope: the computer-generated action and bombastic fights are left behind for a grounded, gritty character study. The film sprints through the action and crawls through the pain, letting the ugliness rip with psychological terror and fear. This isn’t a movie for the faint of mind. 

The ubiquitous comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 film “Taxi Driver” — which follows Travis Bickle, a PTSD-stricken veteran-turned-cab-driver and his mental digression into compulsive violence — are more than warranted. The guttural, surreal, increased uncomfortability of each scene is intellectually brilliant and incredibly unsavory, just as scenes were in “Taxi Driver.” 

The city engulfs Arthur and Travis in similar ways, cornering and controlling them with no moments or feelings of an open horizon. Their motives to fight back are rooted in fantasy, but still force a few hours of think time after the credits roll to reflect on how real it all seems. 

By the end, you feel and think more than you can handle — so yes, make sure you’ve got several hours cleared for a post-“Joker” mental landing. How to unpack the movie will vary from viewer-to-viewer, but it’s important to see past the violence. Its layered plot and vividly gritty, timeless cinematography offer a remarkable peephole into how social issues and a battered psyche can intersect in the extreme — which’ll leave you half-torn, half-mesmerized.

The film is more of a warning than a will-to-violence. It brilliantly transcends the world of fiction to plant an idea, testing not only how many bad days away someone like Arthur can be from falling off the edge — but more importantly, how many bad steps away society is from being able to push a man like him off of it. You’re left with one blistering question: How far is our world from Arthur’s?