By the point Joker: Folie à Deux stumbles from musical to half-cooked courtroom drama, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has reemerged because the title villain. Sitting earlier than the jury, caked in clownface, Joker prepares his closing statements after being tried for the homicide of 5 folks within the first movie—together with the taking pictures of late-night host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) on primetime tv. The presiding decide, aggravated by all of the hijinx, points a reminder: “This isn’t a comedy membership. You aren’t on stage.” Joker, mournful and menacing, tilts his head and stares immediately into the closest digicam. We watch as his sad-sack mug is broadcast on tube televisions throughout Gotham.
This second lies on the gnawed core of Folie à Deux, director Todd Phillips’ sequel to his billion-dollar DC Comics origin story, Joker. That movie traced the decline of Arthur Fleck—battered clown, aspiring stand-up, stalker—and the rise of a homicidal anti-hero. In Phillips’ second, and last, installment, the imprisoned, meager Arthur is revitalized upon assembly Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn (Girl Gaga), a fellow ward at Arkham Asylum. Their real-life romance is squalid and hopeless, however, in Arthur’s daydreams, the deranged inmate-soulmates sing, dance, and lift hell with the Previous Hollywood panache of a Gene Kelly image.
“Beneath all of it, there’s an concept of corruption.… From the jail system to the judicial system to the thought of leisure,” Phillips informed reporters following Folie à Deux’s premiere on the Venice Movie Competition final month. “Within the States, not less than, all the things is leisure, you already know? A courtroom trial could possibly be leisure, and a presidential election could be leisure. So, if that’s true, what is leisure?” Phillips doesn’t attain his desired depths with Folie à Deux, because it appears like he and his writing accomplice, Scott Silver, tried to stretch the setup of “That’s Leisure,” the smash-hit from Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon, right into a characteristic movie. The vanity—that “the world is a stage,” that murders and missteps and flings are all theater—wears skinny in Phillips and Silvers’ arms.
“That’s Leisure” is one among a number of oldies and present tunes sung by Gaga and Phoenix all through the film, each in Technicolor reveries and quietly unhinged mots d’amour. When Arthur catches sight of Lee, she is singing “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” in a music remedy group at Arkham Asylum; the guards and prisoners whistle and shout a recurring motif of “When the Saints Go Marching In”; upon assembly Arthur face-to-face, Lee squeaks out a hushed verse of Judy Garland’s “Get Completely happy.” A powerful “Huh?!” rang out when the Joker sequel was introduced as a musical, however the song-and-dance sequences are the one functioning gears of the movie. (Phillips and his stars’ latest claims that the movie is “not a musical,” are plainly absurd.) I’d applaud the traditional songbook and the performances from Phoenix and Gaga earlier than the work of Phillips or Silver, who slapped some razzle-dazzle onto a fetid script. However you possibly can’t razzle-dazzle a turd.