Joker (Film Review)

2019 Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Films
Directed by: Todd Phillips; Written by: Todd Phillips and Scott Silver
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 122 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 9/10

Arthur Fleck can't stop laughing. It's an involuntary reaction caused by brain trauma. When he's nervous, he laughs. When he's sad, he laughs. When he's crying, and his clown makeup is running down his face, he laughs. Arthur has aspirations of being a stand-up comedian, and he's constantly writing prospective jokes in his journal, while he makes ends meet as a party clown. Until then, he's living with his mom in a rundown apartment in the bad part of Gotham City.
Turns out, that journal wasn't meant for jokes, though. Arthur suffers from several debilitating, unnamed mental illnesses, and his public-healthcare-assigned mental health counselor has assigned him journal work as a form of self-improvement. However, it looks like city funding for that program, as well as for the one providing the seven medications Arthur is taking is about to dry up. Trash pickups have already ceased, and the streets are littered in garbage. One day, Arthur gets assaulted on the job.
"'Is it just me," he asks his therapist, "or is it getting crazier out there?"
Arthur's grasp on reality is already tenuous. The lack of empathy he receives from those around him makes matters worse. As his final tethers to society are seemingly cut one-by-one, will Arthur breakdown, or will he forge a new identity based upon an expression of his truth that's been longing to get out?
Todd Phillips' Joker has been many things to people who both haven't seen it and haven't seen it. A strange negative wave of media propaganda suddenly rose up to greet the film upon its release date, despite the fact that Joker received the Golden Lion, as well as an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice International Film Festival, just a few months before.
Will Joker incite people to violence? Will these idiots who actually pay money to watch films not be able to distinguish the movie from reality, become radicalized, and go on killing sprees, perhaps in the neighborhoods where the people who don't have to pay to watch the movies sleep?
Weird, it's almost like a certain contingent of the American media either doesn't believe American audiences can handle depth and nuance...or that they'd rather Americans just not experience those things altogether. It's patronizing and more proof of just how little the media thinks of your average human.
Joker isn't a movie made to incite the "incels" or whatever other new group the media wants us to feel other than to violence. Joker is about how a lack of societal empathy can lead to violence.
As Arthur Fleck, Joaquin Phoenix puts in yet another transcendent performance in a career full of them. He has to play so many facets here, yet reflects each so flawlessly. He embodies Arthur's pain so sympathetically, makes him feel so real, it's impossible not to feel for him. Yet, when Arthur turns to violence in order to be seen and felt, the acts are somehow both cathartic and yet not glorified.
Todd Phillips proved with the Hangover films that he's got style to spare. Despite what one may feel about Hangover humor, it's tough to argue that those movies don't look great. Phillips brings that same excellent visual sensibility here, with nods to the gritty New York streets seen in classic 70's films. He also shows a certain consistent knack from The Hangover to Joker: the ability to take a strange character that would be an easy object for audience derision, and instead cause the audience to connect with that character. With The Hangover, the character was the goofy Alan, played by Zach Galifianakis. Alan is certainly an oddball, but soon enough, Phillips and Galifianakis have you wanting more of him. The same goes with Arthur Fleck here, which makes his arc in the film all the more heartbreaking. Arthur's increasingly violent and harmful decisions aren't laudable, but they're understandable. The film encourages empathy, even as its central character begins to lose his. As Arthur's understanding of his own story goes from tragedy to comedy, the film itself becomes both more of a tragedy and more of a triumph. It's the self-actualization of a character with no other path to happiness or peace, and yet it's a path that causes great harm to others.
These are all the marks of a deep and nuanced film. Not some stupid, easily dismissed violence-inciter. I'm quite sure those suddenly gasping about the (surprisingly sparse) meaningful violence in Joker were just as in arms when Brad Pitt meaninglessly bashed Madisen Beaty's face in last month?