Review: "Joker"

This film has two major flaws:

a. It suggests—in extremely old-school comic-book manner—that mental illness indirectly spawns what is grassroots movements like Occupy. This film should have veered away from portraying politics as it does.

b. Mental illness is displayed in a far more human light than I've ever seen in a comic-book-based film; still, this is what makes its vulgar portrayal of mental downfall far too simplistic and therefore irritating.

If we side-step the above, the film still has quite a bit going for it. Phoenix's ways of showing Arthur Fleck, his character, as a deeply flawed, almost too-kind-to-be-true entertainer, are very well constructed.

The gritty world of Gotham, the city in which this film exists, is rat-infested, fear-filled, and provides a downtrodden milieu where brutal and violent crime is rife. Fleck just wants to make everybody smile and is plagued with a pathological laugh that goes off at inappropriate times; to me, this is one of the best things about the film. Even though his laugh is fired-off at a lot of inopportune moments an important question is: when is it meant to be and when is it not?

There are a lot of exciting things that can happen at any time in this film, which is also something that provides its secondary gist, after Phoenix's actor's tour de force.

Fleck's downfall, mentally speaking, is interesting, and yet, after circa half of the film, comes at a very steep fall. I'm not suggesting that it is unbelievable—after all, this is a film that's based on a comic-book character—but the rhythm feels quite off at times. Also, mental disorder is, in my mind, panned off too simply in this film as though it follows a straight trajectory. If a person's off their medication, they go haywire, is one of the lessons we learn. I won't give away too much, but this bit grated on me.

I'm glad to know this film is partly based on Alan Moore's brilliant The Killing Joke, as Moore laudably brought The Joker to the forefront of DC's most interesting list of characters by writing his book. Its influence is obvious.

The soundtrack, originally composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, is brilliant and truly heightens the film. It reminded me of both Harry Escott's original compositions for "Shame" and Clint Mansell's for "Requiem for a Dream", and holds its own.

All in all, this is one of the better comic-book-universe films and deserves to be seen again. It's a fairly light palaver, should have been made more complex, but altogether it is both entertaining and disturbing in a good way.