Why the ‘Barbenheimer’ and ‘Glicked’ industry can’t make decent movies anymore.
Is the musical Joker: Folie à Deux a miscalculation, or is it really the venal nihilistic crap Millennials want and deserve? Todd Phillips’s sequel to his repugnant 2019 blockbuster Joker (a perverse knockoff of the Batman franchise) represents one of those rare instances when a filmmaker has carte blanche to do whatever he wants, this time given a $200 million budget for what is essentially a two-hander stage recital.
Working from a script by Scott Silver, Phillips hedges his bet by recycling: Joaquin Phoenix refines his Oscar-winning turn as psychotic urban vigilante/revenge killer Arthur Fleck, this time revealing his insanity through pop songs. Arthur gets a partner in crime, Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a spoiled rich mental defective and outpatient at the Arkham Asylum for the criminally insane, who enters his fantasies. But this harlequin moll can’t match Joker’s lunacy as either lawbreaker or musician.
The true romance in Folie à Deux is between Arthur and pop music — the culture of popular expression that connects the individual to the masses; that makes us feel united, less alone, released from anxiety, and happy. A hack like Phillips has lost faith in that culture, so Folie à Deux is, at best, an honest testament of that disbelief. Having directed the Las Vegas Hangover debauches, Phillips follows Hollywood’s descent into hell. He shows us why the “Barbenheimer” and “Glicked” industry can’t make decent movies anymore.
Folie à Deux justifies dystopia and schizophrenia in response to post-Obama hopelessness, and that desperation comes through when Phoenix first appears with his contorted, emaciated, dislocated shoulder bones, sticking out his red, sinewy tongue for meds like one of the patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As he sings “For Once in My Life” in the prison TV room, Phoenix’s solemn, grotesque pathos is truly moving. The satisfaction of nihilism is not just in his head but before our eyes. His angry Punch profile prepares us for Gaga’s demented Judy profile.
And then Gaga scuttles the movie. She is insanity incarnate, and her pop-star fakeness can’t lift the movie out of its rut. The courtroom debate over Arthur’s fitness to stand trial (mirroring Robert Hur’s corrupt declaration of Joe Biden’s inability to do so) distracts from Phillips’s failure to stage an acceptable, emotionally redemptive musical number. (A pointless overhead shot of multicolored Cherbourg umbrellas as Phoenix walks through the prison yard in the rain would even embarrass the inept Damien Chazelle.) It is characteristic of our legal travails that Arthur’s trial blows up the film’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premise. Caligari eventually revealed its in-the-mind-of-madness conceit, letting the audience off the hook, but this is Caligari without the catharsis.
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Flashback: Folie à Deux revises Pennies from Heaven (1981), Hollywood’s last great movie musical. (Prince’s 1987 Sign o’ the Times, as great as anything from the heyday of MGM, was made outside Hollywood.) Pennies from Heaven was based on British writer Dennis Potter’s postmodern TV series about the morbid inner life of a Depression-era sheet music salesman named Arthur (played by Steve Martin). Director Herbert Ross subverted Potter’s cynicism by emphasizing the life force and sheer talent of the American showbiz tradition and then connected it to visionary creativity as diverse as Edward Hopper and Bertolt Brecht. It was one of the peaks of the American movie-renaissance era. Now, Folie à Deux plunges us into madness — a distillation of Millennial Hollywood.
Song after song — “To Love Somebody,” “If They Could See Me Now,” “Close to You,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and lots of Anthony Newley’s solipsistic catalogue — presents an opportunity for ecstatic irony like Pennies from Heaven, yet the performances here are undeniably faithless. Phoenix doesn’t execute a single successful soft-shoe routine.
No wonder Folie à Deux flopped. That’s consistent with the millennium’s rejection of cultural heritage. A faded clip of Jack Buchanan singing “That’s Entertainment” in Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon provides the ultimate desecration — the same cultural ignorance commemorated in Pixar’s nihilistic Wall-E. These failed entertainments define the current movie era.
