Joker: Folie à Deux

Since Batman's arch-nemesis, The Joker, first appeared in the original comic strip an incredible 84 years ago, the proliferation of interpretations of the perennially chaotic character in comic books, on television, in movies, and in video games has become almost impossible to keep track of. The one constant throughout has been the defining aspect of his personality: pure, distilled nihilism. As Michael Caine's Alfred once said, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” 

That one-note refrain came to an end five years ago with the release of Todd Philips' harrowing, bleak character study of the broken man behind the clown face paint, Joker. Philips painted a disturbing portrait, not of a gleefully destructive antihero, but of a downtrodden nobody. Philips' Joker, Arthur Fleck, is a victim, not a villain. Systematically abused and traumatized by almost everyone he has ever met, Fleck is failed again and again by Gotham City's broken care system, leaving him to spiral ever-deeper into despair and mental illness until he finally snaps, unleashing his monstrous alter-ego. Against all reason, Philips' tragic image of The Joker as the final expression of a despairing man's mental illness resonated so deeply with certain segments of the audience that it went on to gross over $1 billion worldwide.

It's clear that Philips never intended Joker to be anything other than a stand-alone story; but the film's star, Joaquin Phoenix, felt there was more story to tell, and floated the idea of a song-and-dance element in a potential sequel. Five years and a $190 million budget later, that idea has reached fruition in Joker: Folie à Deux.

Opening with a short animated homage to Warner Bros' Looney Tunes cartoons, the film wastes no time subverting the audience's expectations, a theme that Philips maintains (almost sadistically) throughout. Picking up in the immediate aftermath of the first picture, we find a heavily medicated Arthur Fleck awaiting trial in Gotham's brutal Arkham Asylum. Mocked by the abusive prison guards, Fleck is eventually allowed to attend a music therapy class as a reward for good behavior, where a twisted ‘meet-cute’ ensues. Fellow patient Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel takes an interest in Fleck, and thus begins a brief, tenuous love affair between the two, illustrated musically by their reedy, querulous renditions of a selection of favorites from the mid-20^th Century American songbook.

Without giving the plot away, true love was never in the cards for the tragic Fleck, and the film's denouement is in perfect sync thematically with the bleak realism of the first movie. Philips goes out of his way to make the point that Fleck was never a heroic figure, but a pitiful one; and it is this ultimate subversion of expectations which has resulted in initial audience impressions of the film being overwhelmingly negative. Folie à Deux is, however, as brilliant a piece of cinematic subversiveness as you'll ever see. Philips took almost $200 million of DC's money and burned it to prove his audience wrong, and that's an act worthy of The Joker himself. 

Joaquin Phoenix delivers another disturbingly bravura performance as Fleck, and Lady Gaga as Lee plays against type magnificently, deliberately ‘singing down’ in her portrayal of a character who is, in her own way, just as broken and pathetic as Fleck is. If you loved Joker, you may not love this, but you will find yourself being challenged to ask yourself why not.

Lee

Earlier this year, Alex Garland's uncomfortably close-to-home Civil War followed the journey of fictional war photographer Lee Smith across a war-torn near-future USA. Smith is not entirely fictional, but was created as a homage to real-life World War II photographer Lee Miller. Miller is best remembered these days for the indelible historical archive she created, documenting the horror of the Dachau & Buchenwald concentration camps at the end of WWII. But, in truth, Miller's entire life was extraordinary.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Miller's formative years saw her becoming a top fashion model, thanks to a chance encounter with Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue magazine. Miller's meteoric rise even saw her gracing the cover of Vogue itself by age 20. Seeking to broaden her experience behind the camera, Miller then relocated to Paris, intending to study under the famed surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray, but instead became both his lover and muse. In so doing, Miller found herself at the center of a stellar peer group featuring many of the most influential names in surrealist art, including Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, and Pablo Picasso, eventually producing a body of work that would go on to influence other surrealist luminaries such as René Magritte.

This, however, is not the life that Ellen Kuras' biopic Lee concerns itself with. A passion project developed over more than a decade by Kuras and co-producer and star Kate Winslet, Lee follows Miller's career pivot into war photography while living in London at the outbreak of WWII. Initially documenting The Blitz and taking portraits of nurses for British Vogue, she embarked on a mission that would become her legacy to the world following the D-Day invasion of France in 1944. In tandem with another American photojournalist, David E. Scherman of Life magazine, she would go on to document the Battle of Alsace and the liberation of Paris before documenting the unspeakable horrors of the concentration camps.

Kuras (a cinematographer making her directorial debut) paints a portrait of Miller that deliberately mirrors Miller's own instinct for visual storytelling. It's significant that, despite being based on The Lives of Lee Miller (a biography written by Miller's son Antony Penrose), this is a project driven almost entirely by women. Kate Winslet's gimlet-eyed performance as Miller and Kuras' sensitive direction make the crucial point that Miller was uniquely placed to document this harrowing episode in world history from an emotional perspective that a male photographer of that era would be ill-equipped to inhabit. Miller's photographs frequently focus on seemingly insignificant details, which lend her work an almost unbearable pathos. Kuras mirrors this technique in close-up shots of Winslet's face as she reacts to the monstrous events her camera is recording. 

The film is not without its weak spots: Alexandre Desplat's score feels like a rather ham-fisted, by-the-numbers affair which often serves to weaken the film's emotional impact rather than enhance it. However, Kuras wisely eschews music for her most intimate and powerful scenes. In addition, the movie is framed in flashback from the perspective of an older Miller, who is interviewed by an unidentified younger man near the end of Miller’s life in 1977. While this makes sense when the man's identity is finally revealed, it's largely redundant from a cinematic point of view. These are minor quibbles, though; Lee is a powerful depiction of a unique woman.

Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities from Scotland, I'm a former freelancer who wrote movie and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.