‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ review: An off-key musical gone wrong

As a fan of 2019’s Joker, I was of the firm belief that its legacy as a culturally and socially impactful film should be left alone. But with the rated R film grossing over US$1 billion, earning a Best Picture nomination and its star winning an Oscar, it was foolish of me to think studio executives wouldn’t jump on the opportunity to green-light a sequel. So here we are five years later with a musical on our hands.

Now, I hadn’t totally lost all hope when I heard the news about a sequel. While I questioned the need for one, I was still silently hopeful and intrigued by how Phillips would explore the clowned villain again. Even the concept of a musical did not put me off. In fact, it made sense (more on this later) and I was impressed by this bold and contrasting creative approach.

However, despite my optimism, Joker: Folie à Deux proved to have more follies (ba dum tss) than I anticipated. In my review, let’s talk about why this musical ultimately falls flat.

Warning, spoilers ahead!

PLOT

Set two years after the incidents of the first film, Folie à Deux follows Arthur Fleck who is now incarcerated in Arkham State Hospital and awaits trial for five murders. Frail and gauntly as ever, Arthur monotonously trudges down the halls of the asylum every day whilst enduring the tauntings of the guards and his fellow inmates. 

He’s a shell of who he was in Joker and we only see him spark to life when he meets Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel at the minimum security ward’s singing class. There, the pair quickly form a strong connection and express their emotions for one another through song and dance. The musical scenes are interspersed throughout the film and are treated like fantasies happening inside their head (note: folie à deux is a psychiatric syndrome which translates to shared delusion). 

At the same time, Arthur is put back in the media spotlight as his highly-anticipated public trial is about to begin. His lawyer Maryanne Stewart is trying to push for an insanity plea by claiming that Joker is Arthur’s violent split personality whilst Gotham City’s district attorney Harvey Dent (insert Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme here) argues otherwise and fights for the death penalty. 

READ: Psychologist reacts to mental health portrayals in Joker, Split, and more

To me, the question of whether Arthur is Joker or if the clowned persona is a separate entity is unnecessary and drawn out because we already know the answer to this in the first film. In Joker, we could see that Arthur was mentally ill and suffering from severe loneliness and depression. 

When he snaps and decides to shoot the three men who were bullying him, he runs away and performs an unsettling tai chi-like dance with his newfound sense of confidence and power. What follows is the iconic scene where he struts down the West 167th Street Step Stairs in his clown makeup and signature suit. In that moment, he is the Joker. Arthur Fleck and Joker are one. 

Therefore, to dedicate a huge portion of Folie à Deux to re-examining his sanity feels entirely regressive. The ending of the first film shows that he has fully embraced his nihilistic desires, eating up the roars and applause of rioters who too have had enough of Gotham’s oppressive system. To start Folie à Deux back where Arthur was: miserable, weak and dreary, is a poor narrative choice and will not go well with fans.

Compared to the first film, Folie à Deux’s plot is also paper-thin. The film only takes place between Arkham State Hospital and the courthouse. You don’t see much of Gotham either or the true effect Joker has on the grimy city. Folie à Deux goes back and forth between a musical and courtroom drama. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t know what it wants to be or say and what you end up with is a confused and drawn-out plot you can’t invest in.

CHARACTERS

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur is unsurprisingly faultless. Much like the first film, Folie à Deux is anchored by Phoenix’s brilliant performance and the actor has transformed himself yet again into an unsettling version of Arthur that had me feeling tense at times.

The biggest gripe I have is the direction that Philips chose to go with Arthur. If you’re going to slap the name Joker on someone, fans are going to expect Joker to act like Joker but he’s severely subdued in this film. You’re not going to see the iconic villain’s cruel genius, psychological manipulations or wickedly dark humour. In fact, he is the one being manipulated and treated like a bad punchline throughout the film.

The pompousness, dramatics and utter irreverence of Joker are stripped away in this film, leaving a husk of who Arthur was at the end of Joker. There is a scene where Arthur, donned in clown makeup and a crisp suit, puts on a Southern accent and speaks to the jury and witnesses with an air of dignified arrogance. Every time I think the movie is finally going to go with this spirit of Joker, the moment is gone and we’re back to a regressed Arthur.

Further, Joker worked so well in the comics because his origin is unclear. We don’t know why Joker is the way he is and this lack of clarity is what makes him all the more dangerous and unhinged. He has no past or attachments to anyone or anything, which is what makes him Batman’s greatest adversary. However, the demythologising that we see with Arthur in Folie à Deux greatly undermines this and takes away any real danger from his character.

As musically-inclined the movie is, Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel could not be a more promising cast. For the most part, she does an excellent job at being a manic pixie dream girl on steroids who lovebombs Arthur into oblivion. Lee is obsessed with Joker and constantly encourages Arthur to be the Big Bad we all want him to be. But ultimately, she is underutilised in the film. She doesn’t nearly get as big of a role as the trailer promises and her acting is put on the sidelines in exchange for her vocals. 

Past characters also make an appearance and it was interesting to hear their sides of the story. I personally thought one of these characters gave the most emotional and powerful scene in the film. However, it is a shame that Phoenix’s Arthur and Gaga’s Lee never really took flight. Despite their amazing performances, they can only work with what they’re given and ultimately were let down by the lacklustre scriptwriting.

MUSIC

I personally felt a musicalised sequel wasn’t that absurd to consider. We know from Joker that Arthur loves music and has an affinity for drama and theatrics. He is also someone with a low IQ and lacks the social skills to communicate what he wants. Therefore, having musical sequences where lyrics replace dialogue made a lot of sense.

However, Folie à Deux failed to deliver the high notes I was looking for. It’s an ambitious approach that needed an ambitious execution and the musical numbers in the film were simply not audacious or wild enough. Phoenix and Gaga’s renditions of old-time songs such as Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, That’s Entertainment!, and If My Friends Could See Me Now—while sang beautifully—did not make me soar with emotions or feel something stir in my soul as good musicals should. 

Some moments showed us what the film could have been. One highlight was a sequence of The Joker and Harley Show, where the pair echo Sonny and Cher and bust out to a groovy number of the Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody. The opening cartoon sequence set to What the World Needs Now Is Love also sets a thrilling tone for the film. However, these scenes are few and far between as most songs carry the same melancholic and dreary arrangement that drags on and on. The musical numbers are not half as crazy as what you would expect from two of DC’s notoriously deranged characters.

About the halfway mark, you’re internally shouting at the screen, “Get on with it!” because the musical interludes no longer push the plot forward and feel forced. Slow scenes are interrupted by even slower music segments which ultimately have no effect on the storyline. In the end, you’re left with an overwhelming feeling that Philips shoehorned the musical numbers because 1) he casted Lady Gaga and 2) he realised he didn’t have enough plot to pad him over the two-hour mark. 

VISUALS

I’m happy to report that the sequel looks just as good as its predecessor. I watched it in TGV Cinemas’ IMAX Hall and I highly recommend that you do the same to appreciate the colours, sound mixing and visual composition in all its glory. There is a gorgeous colour palette to the film and colours such as orange, blue and red really pop out of the screen.

While there may not be as many iconic shots in Joker: Folie à Deux compared to Joker, cinematographer Lawrence Sher creates some jaw-dropping spectacles that are wonderful to look at, especially with some of the musical sequences. 

However, I am disappointed that some good-looking scenes in the trailer were cut. Most significantly, one of Joker and Lee’s more dynamic sequences on the stairs outside the courthouse. It’s mindboggling why Philips cut this out (and left in other more questionable musical numbers) when it would have easily been one of the defining scenes in Folie à Deux.

VERDICT

Overall, Joker: Folie à Deux lacks the soul and essence of what made the first film great—and that was entirely intentional by Philips and his co-writer Scott Silver. His interview with The Warp revealed his initial purposes with Joker: “I literally described to Joaquin at one point in those three months as like, ‘Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it f—ing Joker. That’s what it was.”

I can look past his patronising tone about calling his project a “real movie” but it’s his sentiment behind making a Joker movie that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s clear that Philips wanted to make a movie about a character struggling with mental illness but didn’t trust his writing enough to think it would succeed on its own. “[K]ids wouldn’t care or go to this movie if it was called Arthur,” he further explains.

So he entered the uber-lucrative superhero genre, cut up one of the most iconic legacy characters in DC Universe and wore Joker like a skinsuit to entice hungry fans. As it turns out, he did write a compelling and wonderfully complex character. So much so that audiences had an adverse reaction to what he intended: while we acknowledge he was a severely disturbed individual, we also empathised with Arthur and understood how the system failed him. 

So what did Philips decide to do? Undo everything he achieved with the character in this definitively anti-audience sequel. Folie à Deux seeks to drive home the point that you should never have rooted for Arthur in the first place because he was and always will be a sad, miserable and weak person who will never amount to anything—not even the Joker he himself created. Philips knows the jarring ending of Joker: Folie à Deux will most likely incite riots within the fandom and he’s all too happy to do it in contempt for an audience that failed to see The Vision in his eyes. In the end, it’s Philips who gets the last laugh. 

Final rating: 4/10

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