Todd Phillips
Joker

It's like Taxi Driver for the Marvel generation, but a Taxi Driver with many ingenuities. The writing isn't particularly refined, surely overshadowed by Joaquin Phoenix's amazing performance, which alone is enough to make it a good film. The potential to create a masterpiece is squandered by a director and screenwriter who previously made a name for himself with The Hangover, thus not exactly arthouse cinema.

The courage is Warner's, allowing a film on a comic book where there isn't a single action or combat scene. That's why Joker seems like a great movie because it stands out against a plethora of non-films, but in the league of auteur films, it struggles to keep up. Imperfect, therefore, but very significant and symptomatic of the times.

I won't spoil the slip-ups; they are gross and you will notice them—approximations, schematism, clichés. What puzzles me the most is the film's main mechanism, which tends to accumulate disasters, cruelties, and disappointments that tear Arthur's heart apart, almost justifying his bad reactions. Society hasn't helped him. He only harms when driven to desperation, as retaliation, or because he's attacked. Here, Joker doesn't play the role of a villain but a disastrous hero, an anti-hero in an upside-down world.

In this dangerous arc, the director can't help but empathize with his protagonist, even when he fails miserably. His criticisms directed at him are weak, wishful. In this sense, it's a very dangerous film with explosive social potential. How many jokers are there in the world? How many outcasts, how many sewer rats? What is Phillips trying to tell us about these pockets of depression inherent in the western world? It's unclear; it seems he tends to justify a violent reaction. Or at least to be fascinated by it. Not out of genuine sociological interest, but for pure aesthetic taste and (anti)logical arrogance. It is an extreme outcome, an apocalyptic solution to survive the daily hell. "The city is burning, isn't it beautiful?"

This is the risk but also the beauty of the film—its boldest and most cutting feature, reaching its peak in an anthology scene that directly enters the history of cinema. Joker's epic unfolds on TV because we're in the 80s, but it applies perfectly to today's social media. A loser, devastated by life, unable to distinguish between good and evil, recognizes only the appeal of appearance. He has nothing to offer, he can't make anyone laugh, but to break into the spotlight, anything goes. His nerve endings are burnt out, nothing can hurt him because his heart is shattered into tiny pieces. And so even violence can be a form of emancipation and success. Especially since people follow him in the rebellion he never even envisioned.

These are dizzying moments in a film somewhat bland in the narrative itself, occasionally superficial in the setting, yet it thrives on the unhealthy physicality of its protagonist and its leading actor, who captures every moment of the viewing. The face, the cheeks, the dripping makeup, the splashes of blood, the hunchback, bruises, and skeletal ribcage. They speak more than many somewhat awkward and standard dialogues. The hysterical dance on that dizzying staircase says it all, where the verbal construction of the character does not stand out for refinement. Those costume and makeup colors are worth half the film for many viewers; it's an irresistible allure of evil.

And in this, Warner has made a big step; after many fake good protagonists seen on TV and in the cinema in recent years, the company decided to focus directly on the villain. It is a praiseworthy choice, but new, difficult paradoxes emerge to unravel. A mad protagonist, who does harm, still fits into a value logic, out of pure necessity for cause-effect links, and thus there is a tendency to justify him because even he has his "good" reasons.

It is another type of hero because the narration (of a still pop film) rejects the non-logic of evil; it must square the circle into a rational and socially plausible vision. In the consumer world of TV, even rebellion against TV becomes a television cult. Even the anti-hero, illuminated by the spotlights, becomes a hero.