Taxi Driver with makeup kind of misses the point

When you're going to see a movie about a clown, there's only one album you should be playing on the way there. The cover is above. No, the Butthole Surfers don't really have anything to do with clowns but that's not really the point. Neither did Joker, unless you're into the whole "evil clown" thing that creates rather pointless stories like It. (Or you played Dragon Warrior 2 on the Nintendo gray box. Shut up. I'm old.)

So, yeah, I finally made it to Joker and I have many thoughts, which is in itself kind of remarkable since it was a film that was paced at a level that approached tedium but had enough style happening on the screen (helped ably by Joaquin Phoenix) to keep you watching, if occasionally impatiently. The Joker is one of the more fascinating characters in the DC stable, as he's the pinnacle of the "Batman as his own antagonist" phenomenon. Normally, you read a story for the lead character whose story it is; the protagonist. But, from the 70s forward, a lot of people read (and many writers wrote) Batman comics to see him play the straight man to his more interesting opponents. Batman was a force of nature; often one-dimensional in his approach to life (billionaire playboy who solves 'problems' with his fists.) That gets old fast. So you'd read his comics to see what unusual activities figures like The Joker and The Riddler and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Clayface were going to get up to. We were more interested in what was going on inside the minds of the deviants from society than the neo-fascist in the cape who claimed to be defending it (but who, in all honesty, also clearly had some mental health issues.) The most prominent among those was The Joker, who wasn't just compelled by his psychological issues, but reveled in them. The greatest Joker story ever told was Steve Engelhart's "The Laughing Fish" in 1978, where the Joker dumped chemicals into the water around Gotham to give all of the fish his maniacal face and then tried to claim a trademark on them so he'd get a percentage of every fish sale. When he didn't get it, he started climbing the chain of officials at the local patent office, murdering them until he found one that agreed with him. My girlfriend gave me a confused frown when I mentioned this story. I said: "Yes. That's exactly the way you're supposed to react. If you're not laughing." He was crazy, but there was a distorted genius in what he did. That's entertaining to watch or read.

Joker, the film, is not like this. Phoenix is entertaining enough to watch, but he's entertaining because he's Joaquin Phoenix, not The Joker. Writers Todd Phillips and Scott Silver (Phillips is also the director) decided to make an origin story for the character that's grounded in more realistic circumstances than "burglar breaks into playing card factory, falls into chemicals while fleeing police, comes out looking like Billie Joe Armstrong after bathing in bleach for a week, loses mind." Bob Kane and Bill Finger's original story was as simplistic as most comics were in those days and DC has been trying to catch up to Marvel for, oh, fifty years now by attempting to make their characters into real people. The first few DC films have largely failed at that, so they doubled down here and, in that respect, largely succeeded. This is a story about someone with mental health problems who has been ignored or discarded by society as so many people are these days. Phillips and Silver weaved in the prevailing economic mood of the time (so many with so little, so few with so much), in addition to making the statement that society isn't paying enough attention to those that need help, in both internal and external ways. In making the film more of a personal tragedy, they've essentially made it the Pagliacci joke. This is an apocryphal story about a man who goes to a doctor because he's so miserable and the doctor suggests he go see the famous clown, Pagliacci, to improve his mood, whereupon the man informs him: "But doctor, I am Pagliacci." For those of you in the comic set, this is the joke that Rorschach recites while we're watching The Comedian get tossed out a window to his death in the opening scene of The Watchmen.

Speaking of Alan Moore, Phillips and Silver clearly drew inspiration from Moore's The Killing Joke, which was a mild reworking of the Joker's origin to be a failed comedian, rather than just a small-time hood. They're also obviously big Scorcese fans because all I could think of while watching the first half of this film was that it was funny to see DeNiro doing a remake of Taxi Driver. But this is kind of where all of this begins to break down. Taxi Driver was Scorcese's statement on how some people felt that society had decayed and Travis Bickle was going to cleanse it and himself. Joker is making the same statement but from a different angle, in that the rich have allowed people to suffer in a state of decay when they shouldn't have to. The locus for that societal perspective is the very emotional tale of a man who has suffered that neglect, both in general and personally, as he discovers that his life is a lie told to him by his similarly ill mother and his gentle nature is easily abused by others. It's meant to be an emotional tale because, like the Pagliacci story, it's a tragedy. You're meant to feel sympathy for the protagonist because of what he's suffered. The problem is: That's not The Joker.

The reason that Engelhart's version was so interesting was because he held an internal logic that could be seen by others, even if it couldn't be understood. There was intelligence there. Similarly, the most obvious and direct comparison to Phillips/Silver/Phoenix's version is the one created by the Nolan brothers and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. Ledger's Joker is considered insane because he looks at things radically differently from most of society and then acts on that perception. His intelligence is evident in every word he speaks in the film, as is the ruthless nature behind it that drives him to make statements with both words and actions. Phoenix's Joker is the polar opposite of that. He's not a figure to be feared and marveled at. He's an object of pity until he goes about murdering people, whereupon the pity becomes mixed with revilement and a reintroduction of the disdain he's felt all his life. It's not compelling. In some ways, it's not even interesting, except for the fact that it's much closer to reality than much of what is displayed in Nolan's film. Arthur is what the Joker probably would be in the real world: a less confident, somewhat more off-kilter Travis Bickle. There's nothing wrong with a film or a story based on emotion. There are some really good ones. But, again, that's not The Joker.

Indeed, when Arthur finally does begin making pronouncements at the end of the film, there's nothing particularly innovative or interesting about them. They're simply restatements of what the film has already been telling us: society has forgotten or ignored these people and now there's a tiny bit of payback. These aren't unusual statements of philosophy. They're boilerplate repetition. There are no questions posed, as by Ledger's version, about the value that human lives hold or how some may be more valuable than others. That's implicitly what Phillips' film is saying, but that's the screenplay preaching, as the characters in his film aren't asking any of those questions or even considering them. They're already fully-formed in their opinions and don't develop at all, except in that Arthur changes from meek servant to vengeful killer. Are there layers to that character in the same way there are in other versions of it? I'm not sure.

I appreciated Phillips' approach to storytelling. It's a moody story that stays moody; even moreso than Taxi Driver. He also pointedly used a comic panel approach to several scenes. Arthur crossing the street to Arkham Asylum and the overhead shot of him curled in his bed with cigarettes and gun resting on the bedside table are both moments that could be dropped right into a comic book page. Those are establishing shots, giving you a feel for where the next several panels or couple pages are going to be and what they're going to feel like. Frank Miller must also still be feeling a little tickle from people continuing to borrow the "pearls in the air" moment when Martha Wayne is shot that he first introduced in The Dark Knight Returns. And, again, Phoenix has to be lauded for his performance, as does Zazie Beetz, as Sophie, the neighbor down the hall and object of Arthur's fantasies.

This isn't a bad film. It's just not a very good one. One aspect that drags it down is its very nature: it's yet another comic character origin story. Are we going to need a Joker reboot 10 years down the road the way they seem to be doing with Spider-Man every decade? Do we need this story told again with different actors and someone else trying to put their own shine on a piece of tin that's almost worn through from all the polishing? In contrast, you know what one of the best things about Ledger's Joker was? The Nolans didn't even bother trying to do an origin story for him. It wasn't important. Here he was in full force from the opening minutes of the film. Indeed, they kept teasing the audience with what his life story might have been. The fully formed nature of his character is what gave it and the film such dynamism. A similar phenomenon can be seen in The Silence of the Lambs. We aren't shown normal-if-somewhat-creepy psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter before he starts chowing down on people. He's already there in the, uh, flesh when the film begins. He's witheringly intelligent, dangerous, and confident. So is Heath Ledger's Joker because the origin of "an agent of chaos" really doesn't matter.

But the other weight on this film is the seeming insistence on reducing the spectacular to the mundane. Superheroes and their opposite numbers are intentionally larger than life. If DC's attempt to make its characters real humans outside of the spandex is to reduce them to people that most of us, for good or ill, would probably ignore, they're kind of missing the point. Believe you me, I'm not interested in another Marvel fireworks display, either. I haven't even seen Endgame yet and I'm not sure I'm going to bother. I've honestly had my fill of typical superhero stories, which is why I stopped reading them 30 years ago. But I'm still interested in characters that fascinate on the screen because of who they are and how they look at the world. If the only one that's offered is a meeker version of Travis Bickle, well... I've been there already; in the same way I've seen enough wild costumes and force bolts.