Three reasons why I didn’t like Todd Phillips’ ‘JOKER’ (2019)
(Caution: With spoilers)
In the midst of high praise and critical acclaim for JOKER played by Joaquin Phoenix, I find myself among a small group of people who actually really didn’t like the movie. The movie has already collected $556 million in box office revenues but I personally left the movie theater wanting a refund. JOKER disappointed me on many levels, perhaps for my own fault of having high expectations from a character whose portrayal by Heath Ledger in the 2008 The Dark Knight movie has left an unforgettable impression on me since.
So here’s me trying to shout my lungs out to the world, trying to explain to their shocked wide eyed faces why I not just disliked the movie but also wished it had never been made.
1) The Joker in JOKER is not The Joker
From beginning to end of Todd Phillip’s JOKER, I was constantly waiting for the maniacal, genius and unpredictable character to appear and baffle the audience with his unmatched tendencies of evilness which he himself found highly amusing. Just to recount an incident from Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’, during the fund raiser for Harvey Dent (at Bruce Wayne’s house), the Joker holds Rachel Dawes hostage with a gun, holding her dangerously close to a shattered window. The Batman then says to the Joker, “Let her go”, to which the Joker replies, “Very poor choice of words” and actually lets her go and fall off the window.
Such acts of random shocks and awe that the Joker has presented to his audience (both in previous movies and comic depictions) were completely missing in JOKER. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker was always highly predictable in his actions, including when he shoots his role model, Murray Franklin (played by Robert De Niro) in the head during a live TV show. Frankly, I saw that coming from a mile away. The Joker character I grew up knowing would not just shoot Murray Franklin. He would have tortured him and made him kill himself. The Joker as a character was never scary because he could kill but because of the mind games he played with his victims that left them mentally scarred. This side of the Joker was never properly shown in this movie which made me feel like a kid promised with ice cream and actually left with an empty cone.
2) I don’t want to know the Joker and I don’t want to sympathize with him
One of scariest elements of the Joker (be it in the movies or in the comics) has always been the fact that we don’t know who the Joker really is. He is a man in a scary face paint who is unidentifiable. When caught by the police, they don’t have any records, no matching fingerprints and no found allegiances. What scares people is what they don’t know and this element of mystery always made the Joker incredibly difficult to figure out for anyone who wanted to take him out. In this movie, the Joker is Arthur Fleck, who is not only not scary but actually pitiful. He is a severely bullied and societally tortured human being who is constantly being harassed by random people in his life, including his employer. As a comic book fan and a regular follower of all his past movie portrayals, this attempt at sympathizing with the Joker and his past is very difficult for me. The Joker in many of his alternate portrayals has committed some incredibly heinous crimes and Todd Phillip’s JOKER tries to substantiate all those actions because Arthur Fleck was bullied, beat up a few times, fired from his job and was raised by a mentally ill single mother. Let me remind everyone that the Joker is a character that once shot commissioner Gordon’s daughter (a beloved comic character), raped her, recorded all of it on camera and then showed the video of it on loop to her father while tied naked on a fun park train.
The Joker is a character that when played by Heath Ledger, killed Rachel Dawes, nearly killed her beloved district attorney Harvey Dent and then mentally manipulated him on a hospital bed to turn him against his own city, Gotham, which turned Harvey into the menacing villain Two Face.
So, No, I am not convinced by JOKER and its weak attempt at making me want to pity Arthur Fleck. I know who he becomes and the things he does and no amount of beating up on him before he becomes the Joker is going to make me forget that. I didn’t want to pity on the joker because the only two emotions I have ever known to associate with the character have been of fear and shock.
3) JOKER tells a different story and not that convincingly
Finally, the Joker drives through a very different lane than the origin comics that tell the story of how Arthur Fleck becomes the Joker. I know that movies have always manipulated origin stories to make them more interesting or thrilling but changing almost everything about the original story is going just too far. In the 2016 animated movie ‘The Killing Joke’ (inspired from the 1988 comic of the same name), the man who eventually becomes the Joker is a struggling stand-up comedian who falls into the trap of some criminals and gets involved in their crimes because of his poor financial condition. His inability to make a living for his family forces his hand but things go wrong as during an attempted robbery, he falls into a tank of industrial chemicals. His wife and unborn child are killed by his associate criminals and the combined effects of being responsible for their deaths and the after effect of the chemicals on his brain turn him into the psychotic maniac the Joker. This movie is nowhere near the original portrayal and simply confused me on many levels as to why the movie took so much effort to play out an entirely new script for a character origin which already has a very compelling original story. The story depicted makes some sense because a child raised by a mentally retarded woman is bound to have certain replicated effects but it’s not the Joker story we needed and its definitely not the Joker story we deserved.
Todd Phillip’s JOKER disappointed me on many levels because it ruins the image of one of the most iconic DC characters and it also sends a very negative message to its audience at the end of the movie where Arthur Fleck is shown to be a sort of a leader for all the psychotic and mentally ill people in Gotham who relish the death of a celebrated TV figure (Murray) and enjoy demolishing and vandalizing their own city. The Joker has always been an incredible villain but stories (and movies) have always been told, watched, liked and loved for their ability to show heroes who rise above their predicaments, outwit the villain and show the world that the villain never wins. This movie is a story about a man who goes mad and then is idolized by a mass of people (which seems like the villain wins). This story brings to surface a reality that I personally don’t want to come in terms with. I believe that fictional stories have the power to change reality and inspire people to be more than who they are. Watching heroes defeat villains (like the Joker) empowered me as a teenager to defeat my own demons, to tell myself that I can be better than what the world wants to make of me. JOKER as a story has no purpose except to spit a harsh reality into all our faces. It says that there will always be people like Arthur Fleck who will break down because of the struggles in their life and then make the world suffer for it. I for one refuse to believe in such stories because life should not be about accepting the brutal realities of life. It should be about having the ability to recognize them, rise above them and be willing to change them for the better. As the arch nemesis of the Joker and the most famous DC character, The Batman, once said, “It’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.”
