Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX
[Author's note: I'm avoiding discussion on the last half-hour of Joker: Folie à Deux, but potential spoilers from the preceding 80 minutes will occasionally slip out, so proceed with caution.]
When it was announced that the sequel to director/co-writer Todd Phillips' 2019 Joker would indeed be a musical, you could sense a collective raising of hackles everywhere, fans of that comic-book-villain origin story not generally the sort eager to sit through a song-filled spectacle with or without the involvement of Lady Gaga. (It's worth remembering that on the same 2018 weekend that her A Star Is Born debuted to more than $40 million domestic, Venom opened to more than $80 million.) And when we learned that Joker's followup was boasting the subtitle Folie à Deux, you could practically hear the percolating ire of the previously devoted. Was that subtitle in French?! With a freaking accent mark?! How precious and pretentious was this thing going to be?!
Now that Phillips' film has opened, I'm not convinced that it's either. But if you thought the title and genre were initially baiting and galling to die-hard Joker acolytes, just wait'll you get a load of Folie à Deux itself, which is like a big, extended middle finger to everyone who adored the original movie – as well, perhaps, as a giant eff-you to Warner Bros. for making it, the motion-picture academy for awarding it, and the global marketplace for turning it into a billion-dollar smash. You've heard of biting the hand that feeds you? This is Phillips not only biting that hand but severing it, sauteing it, and devouring it while licking his lips and demanding seconds. It's a truly flabbergasting experience, like the Megalopolis of comic-book flicks, and part of me wants to applaud Phillips and co-screenwriter Scott Silver for “treating” Joker fans – and I'm one of 'em! – to something they're bound to hate. (And clearly do hate, as Folie à Deux netted a D grade from the tracking firm CinemaScore. By contrast, 2004's Catwoman, 2011's Green Lantern, and 2021's Eternals all scored a B.) Yet it would be easier to praise Phillips' and Silver's audacity if, in exchange for the feature-length face slap, they gave us something pleasurable in its place. Instead, barring very few moments of relief, nearly everything about this project reeks of misery, exhaustion, and boredom. It's one thing to not give an audience a good time. Why do I sense that even the filming was a slog for most everyone involved?
As Folie à Deux opens – or rather, the live-action Folie à Deux, as it's preceded by a mildly amusing, Looney Tunes-esque animated short in which Joker wages war with his shadow – two years have passed since Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck killed six people, among them, on live television, Robert De Niro's talk-show host Murray Franklin. Having spent the interim in the Arkham asylum, Arthur's trial is finally approaching, his lawyer (an unusually dour Catherine Keener) angling for a split-personality defense that will ultimately prevent a death penalty. But well before Arthur enters the courthouse, he locks eyes with fellow inmate Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who reveals herself to be a Joker super-fan. Love immediately blossoms between the two, leading to doe-eyed swooning (from behind bulletproof glass) and occasional physical contact and plans for a happy future together. But first, they have to get Arthur freed.
I would love to tell you that, not counting the songs, there's more to Phillips' followup than that. Except there really isn't: Arthur and Lee fall in love, Arthur goes to trial, and that's about it. There's a coda, of course, and a lot of repetitive scenes of brutal prison guards (one of them played by Brendan Gleeson) being brutal. Otherwise, though, Folie à Deux really needs its musical interludes, because there's nothing else happening to justify the movie's absurdly protracted 138-minute running length. To be fair, plenty of feature-length courtroom dramas rarely leave the courtroom yet still manage to be riveting. The problem here, or part of the problem, is that what's being litigated are events that we already saw in the first Joker. So when the lawyers played by Keener and Harry Lawley (doing his best Peter Sarsgard impression as Batman fixture Harvey Dent) argue their cases – and when Arthur takes over as his own attorney – it's disorienting yet tedious, like listening to the first film while watching its sequel. When they take the stand, it's fun to again see Zazie Beetz (reprising her role as Arthur's fantasy girlfriend Sophie) and Leigh Gill (Arthur's diminutive clown co-worker Gary Puddles), the latter of whom expresses years of terror and trauma with such empathetic force that my eyes welled. They're not enough, however, to make up for the lethargic sameness of the trial sequences, nor the abject stupidity of the faux “realism.” Would any judge, ever, allow Arthur to represent himself in full Joker regalia, and then, later, have the nerve to say, “I won't have my courtroom turned into a circus!”?
It's tempting to say that Folie à Deux's plotting requires so much suspension of disbelief that the musical numbers are practically cinéma vérité in comparison. That would only be half-true, however, because sometimes the performed songs actually are cinéma vérité, or at least as close to it as non-documentaries get. Phillips seems to think that as long as you throw a song into the mix every few minutes, your movie is a musical – and, technically, I guess he's right. But I don't think I've ever before seen a musical with such an inconsistent sense of style.
Some tunes, such as Arthur's early rendition of “For Once in My Life” in the Arkham break room, are clearly imagined representations of mood in realistic settings. Some are lavish production numbers in which Arthur and Lee act as hosts of a tacky '70s variety show. Some are romantically heightened escapades familiar from Moulin Rouge! And some, including Arthur serenading Lee during a live TV interview, are delivered as actual songs heard by more than merely the people in Arthur's head. Lee also sings solo when Arthur isn't around, so the idea that public crooning is specifically Arthur-ian doesn't hold contextual water. There's no guiding principle behind how the era pop hits and Great American Songbook titles are offered, and what's especially deadly for this genre is that Phillips never gives us a reason for Folie à Deux to be a musical. We knew from the original Joker that Arthur oftentimes lives in a fantasy, but nothing he did in that movie suggested a particular affinity for song and dance. Is this newfound passion for easy-listening standards simply something that happens after two years in Arkham? Should we warn The Penguin's Cristin Milioti about this?
You could maybe forgive the nuttiness of the song inclusions if these bits were performed with proper cheekiness and drive, or if Phillips appeared to have the slightest idea about where to position his camera. Barring those two variety-show interludes, though, it's one intentionally dull, listless performance after another, regardless of whether choreography is involved. It's hardly a requirement for a movie musical to be lighthearted; Cabaret, Pennies from Heaven, and Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark are hardly laugh riots. But they do require a fair degree of energy, and more often than not, Folie à Deux is where energy goes to die – except when Lady Gaga is around. As you might imagine, she's bona-fide spectacular when Phillips finally allows her to tear into a musical routine, as she does to superb effect partnering with Phoenix on the Bee Gees' “To Love Somebody” and, especially, Sammy Davis Jr.'s “Gonna Build That Mountain.” (That latter number also gives us the divine sight of an ecstatic-looking Phoenix tap-dancing, and quite impressively.) Yet even though she's hampered by bum writing and a character – a wealthy graduate student in psychology! – that refuses to make sense, Lady Gaga is bewitchingly watchable all throughout, primarily because her portrayal has what Phoenix's no longer does: mystery, and with it, the threat of danger.
Phoenix remains as frighteningly committed to his Arthur Fleck performance as he was five years ago. (It's upsetting to think of the ravages his body has endured between Phoenix's chubbiness in last year's Beau Is Afraid and his emaciated form here.) But we all know these tricks by now, and consequently, despite the actor's focus and fervor, nothing that Arthur/Joker does is surprising. Because this is a “new” Harley Quinn, however, Lady Gaga keeps us in a state of expectant excitement, her affectless demeanor and powerful stare forcing us to question just how crazy this Arkham resident is. Phillips' movie ends up letting the performer, and us, down, and badly, particularly when she's only around as a courtroom spectator. But beginning with her blowing-my-brains-out gesture – a genius bit because she looks at the gun rather than away from it – and rendition of the Sweet Charity anthem “If They Could See Me Now,” Lady Gaga is still the best reason to see Folie à Deux. (She would've been the best reason to see House of Gucci, too, if there were a single reason beyond Lady Gaga to sit through that debacle.)
It's doubtful, though, that the Joker faithful would consider that any kind of impetus to see the film given Phillips' apparent obsession with either ignoring or abusing their trust. It's “bad” enough that Folie à Deux was conceived as a musical. (And we don't really need the quotation marks: It's a bad movie full stop, if one with a few elements of greatness.) But in the last half-hour especially, which I won't delve into, Phillips and his collaborators make it abjectly clear that the affection so many have for Arthur Fleck and his Joker was for naught – that he wasn't worthy of their time or devotion, or even their basic interest. That's a cruel, unfair swipe at millions of fans who likely made Todd Phillips rich beyond his wildest dreams, and a joke, in truth, worthy of Joker himself ... but with current ticket-buyers being the butt of that joke. That D from CinemaScore makes perfect sense, because it's not a grade given when those polled think a movie is lousy; it's given when they're pissed. And anger, I'm sorry to say, is the only active, genuine emotion the soul-deadening disappointment Joker: Folie à Deux can hope to inspire.
WHITE BIRD
As opposed to Joker: Folie à Deux's D, audiences polled by CinemaScore gave director Marc Forster's White Bird an A+ … which is its own kind of warning. Don't get me wrong: Plenty of worthy titles have received this hearty collective recommendation, among them E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Die Hard, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. But so have Soul Surfer, Dolphin Tale, Music of the Heart, Harriet, Dreamer … . Passable entertainments suffused with so much nobility of purpose and inherent do-goodery (that enervating Oscar hog Gandhi is another A+ recipient) that deeming the films as anything less than perfection could be perceived as a character flaw: “So you're in favor of dolphin abuse, then?!” Personally, I'd be fine with giving Forster's sequel/prequel to 2017's Wonder – itself an A+ title – something in the B-/C+ range. It's earnest, engaging, and well-performed. Yet I do bristle a bit knowing that the Holocaust tale at its core is only being told so a present-day teenage bully will learn to be nice.
Although Wonder's central figure is prep-school student Auggie, facially disfigured as a result of Treacher Collins syndrome, director Stephen Chbosky's adaptation routinely shifted its focus, and its narration, to others in Auggie's orbit: his sister, his best friend, his sister's best friend. The movie remains a largely astounding example of shared yet differing perspectives, and in its opening minutes, it appears as though White Bird will follow in Wonder's footsteps, ceding the spotlight to Auggie's prep-school tormentor Julian (played, then and now, by Bryce Gheisar). Having been expelled for his cruel treatment of Auggie years prior, Julian is now at a new prep school, doing his best to lay low and trying to ignore the types of pubescent taunting and meanness he himself was expelled for. But upon returning from school, he finds in his upscale New York apartment his grandmother Sara (Helen Mirren), a French artist in town for a career retrospective. Knowing full well of her grandson's trouble-making past, Sara takes this opportunity to school Julian on the benefits of kindness, which she does by recounting her own teen years, when she was a Parisian Jew hounded by Nazi occupiers during World War II, and a disabled boy named Julien successfully hid her in his parents' barn for more than a year.
It's a moving story. It's also, in this telling, an awfully contrived story, featuring too many appearances by the titular white bird signifying hope, too many implausible contrivances, too much manufactured emotion and on-the-nose dialogue … and don't get me started on the oversize CGI wolves that appear to fundamentally understand the moral bankruptcy of Nazis. It's also easy to quibble with the decision to have the entire cast of French characters speak with English accents, among them Gillian Anderson, a Chicago native who has been imitating a Brit for the last quarter-century.
But young leads Ariela Glaser and Orlando Schwerdt are quite affecting as the heroic youths Sara and Julien. Forster's mostly prosaic direction does boast legitimate visual magic whenever the kids sit in the barn's defunct car and imagine traveling to countries and continents unexplored. And while it would've been preferable if Gheisar's Julian been more of a presence in his own Wonder offshoot – he's really only visible at the very start and very end – it's hard to gripe too much about any movie that provides nearly constant Helen Mirren narration, as well as routine cutaway shots displaying her incandescent, now-79-year-old loveliness. I won't even ding Mirren, in White Bird, for entering with a French accent that she drops not five minutes into the picture. She's a Dame, dammit, and a grand one.
'SALEM'S LOT
If I were to compose a list of my most traumatic TV-viewing experiences as a pre-teen, ranking right near the top would be the commercials for director Tobe Hooper's 1979 Salem's Lot. Not the two-part Stephen King mini-series itself: the commercials, which showed that poor, dead little boy Ralphie Glick floating in from the mist, smiling malevolently and scratching at the window of his living older brother. Watching CBS' Saturday-night comedy lineup with my grandma, I hid under a blanket whenever that ad appeared, and wound up having literal nightmares about the image for years. Especially as a now-56-year-old, I didn't expect writer/director Gary Dauberman's new 'Salem's Lot adaptation (newly streaming on Max) to deliver anything close to that level of gut-clenching horror, and it certainly doesn't. But I also didn't expect this reprise of King's material to be so thunderously ill-scripted and bland that my primary instinct would be to laugh rather than shiver. Things thankfully perk up in the final half-hour, but otherwise, it felt as though the author's kind tweets about the movie had more to do with it reinstating his book title's originally missing apostrophe than anything actually on-screen.
It's once again vampire time in the Maine township of Jerusalem's Lot, and your first hint that 'Salem's Lot won't hold a candle to its cult-classic '79 forebear (I never saw the 2004 TNT remake) comes with the casting of Danish actor Pilou Asbæk in the James Mason role of vampire servant Richard Straker. Asbæk is decent enough, but it's a bit like replacing Dom Pérignon with seltzer. Offering glowering instruction to a local mover to be very careful with this crate because it's very old and very delicate and mustn't be disturbed, this Straker may as well have added “... and Nosferatu is asleep inside, so please don't wake him.”
Events just grow more forced and obvious from there, and considering that Dauberman wrote the collective five-ish hours of It and its sequel, you'd think he'd know better than to attempt to squeeze King's 'Salem's Lot into just under two hours. He manages to do this, principally, by jettisoning all secondary characters and subplots – where are Fred Willard and Julie Cobb when you need them? – and by removing any lingering mystery about what the threat to the town actually is. Nearly everyone here is aware of the blood-suckers' existence, if not a blood-sucker themself, before the movie's halfway point. I know they're undead, but these creatures really could've used some room to breathe.
Still, after turning off the movie at around the 75-minute mark last night, I'm glad I returned to it this morning, because there's genuine fun to be had in the extended finale – not that nearly any of it comes from Stephen King's novel. Although almost nothing about Dauberman's movie is legit frightening, the director does come through with a few enjoyably demented flourishes, including an (unseen) airborne attack that concludes with Lewis Pullman's native author Ben Mears landing on a vampire. But when the action ultimately climaxes at the Jerusalem's Lot drive-in, Dauberman really goes to town, igniting memories of The Walking Dead while crafting something entirely vampire-centric, and giving us a rush of memorable, Sam Raimi-ian images that include our view of a gun-wielding hero seen through a vampire's open throat. Helping the overall mess that is 'Salem's Lot is a solid cast that includes Pullman, John Benjamin Hickey, Bill Camp, Spencer Treat Clark, and acting godsend Alfre Woodard, the only participant who bothers with a regional dialect. Saving the mess is Dauberman's abandonment-of-King closer, which suggests that vampires not only fly, but can drive. I'm not sure why, but that's kind of scarier.
