Joker: Folie a Deux maintains many of the stylistic traits that made the original a refreshingly unique entry into the world of comic book characters, but in trying to turn this sequel into a kind of musical, the story fails to take off, we learn very little to deepen our understanding of the characters, and the overall result is a disjointed mess.
Full Disclosure: I enjoyed the first Joker film, as a unique take on a familiar comic book character, taking what was ostensibly the superhero genre and thrusting it into a Taxi Driver-type story. However, I also wasn’t entirely sure that a sequel was necessary. I thought it worked really well as a stand-alone story, and the only thing that might have made me more interested is if we continued the story from Joker’s perspective, and explored a new take on Batman where he’s seen as a rich, arrogant, sanctimonious bully that the Joker is trying to expose to the world for what he is. Based on the previews, it was clear that’s not what we were getting.

Review

Joker: Folie a Deux is set two years after the events of Joker, as Arthur Fleck is being held at the Arkham mental institution, waiting for a judge to rule on whether or not he is fit to stand trial. He’s a mild mannered prisoner, and while no one would mistake them for friends, he’s established a rapport with the guards, noticeably the head guard, Jackie Sullivan (played by Brendan Gleeson). Things begin to change when he meets Lee Quinzel, the Harley Quinn-type character played by Lady Gaga, in a song-therapy class in the minimum security wing of the asylum. Their connection is instantaneous – Lee “gets him” you see – and he begins to fall back into the mannerisms of his Joker persona.

The acting throughout the film is excellent. Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t expand much on the title role that won him an Oscar in 2020, but his physical performance and twitchy facial expressions remain equal parts entertaining and disturbing. Lady Gaga provides us with a new kind of Harley Quinn than the ones we’ve seen in other recent offerings, playing the character with a consistent restrained madness. And Gleeson, dominating presence that he usually is, gives us a prison guard that is outwardly jovial, but surging with barely contained menace.

Unfortunately, the acting is by far the best thing about the movie, and the rest fails to support the work of those three performers. The biggest problem with the film is that it suffers from a noticeable lack of momentum. There’s just very little here that drives one scene to the next. Part of that is probably because we never really know what the Joker wants throughout the movie. By the time we finally get to his trial at the end of the film, we’re not really invested in the outcome, because it seems as though he isn’t either.

The Arthur Fleck and Lee Quinzel during the trial, seen in one of their most “in character” moments as Joker and Harley Quinn.

In terms of genre, this is much more of a musical than anything else. The characters break into song constantly, either in little snippets of tunes, or full on stage performances. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, in large part because it’s so disjointed. Musicals are always a little silly, of course, and require a massive suspension of disbelief. But the best ones work when the music flows seamlessly from the story and the particular scene in which a song begins. In Joker: Folie a Deux some of the musical numbers are played as pure fantasy, some are played as characters singing within the reality of a scene, and some are a mixture of the two, and songs seem to come out of nowhere.

Not content with giving us just a musical, the last quarter of the movie plays as a courtroom drama, and there is little in the way of flow to the proceedings. Part of that chaos might be intentional, but it doesn’t make for successful storytelling. We don’t get the large swings back and forth through the testimony that most good courtroom dramas have that leave us uncertain as to the outcome until the very end. This one just plays out as a long, slow character assassination.

I will say this for Joker: Folie a Deux: it’s ambitious. I’m not sure what exactly led Todd Phillips to attempt to make a musical/courtroom drama as a sequel to a successful film that was itself a dark 70s-style take on a familiar comic book villain, but I guess he gets some points for endeavouring to make something unique. And usually I’m all for taking big swings, but it’s also hard to give too much credit if you don’t actually make contact with the ball.

Spoilers Ahead

Brendan Gleeson is also was dominating presence in any movie, as he was in this one, but I’m not sure the role he played really lived up to his acting talents.

As expected, the story revolves around the relationship between Arthur and Lee. But in the end, when Fleck weepily acknowledges in court that he doesn’t really want to be Joker, and that there never really was a Joker, Lee becomes disillusioned because he’s not the person she thought he was, and she walks out of the courtroom and out of his life.

There might actually have been a better story if the film was told from her perspective. She’s the one that changes her life and goes to the effort to pursue a relationship with a famous killer. She’s the one that, after falling madly in love, becomes disillusioned when she finds out he’s not the person that she thought he was. And she’s the one that makes the decision to walk away at the end. It really seems like she should have been the protagonist. Instead, we’re just left with Fleck being sad about how everything turned out.

The film is thematically all over the place, but by the end it kind of seems to land on a theme about the dangers of hero worship. This could apply both to the outside world and how it looks at Joker, as well as Gaga’s Quinzel character. Maybe that was Todd Phillips’ subtle or subconscious comment about people who watched the first movie and came away believing that it was a story about a heroic figure.

When the possibilities of the courtroom scenes exhaust themselves near the end of the movie, rather than give us the usual scene of a courtroom verdict, Phillips just decides to blow shit up. Literally. It all ends in an explosion (set off by Joker fanatics) that takes out most of the courthouse and allows Fleck to temporarily escape. The explosion that happens at the end isn’t totally unexpected, just because, knowing how the first one ended, we’re expecting something to happen. The problem is that it isn’t really supported by anything. There are one or two shots of crowds outside the courtroom, and we’re told about things happening in Gotham, but we never really see the world outside of the asylum or courtroom and the effect that the Joker is having on it. Therefore, when it violently intrudes on the main story, the explosion seems all a bit deus ex machina.

The movie finally concludes back at the asylum with Fleck being stabbed in a hallway, and bleeding out on the ground, dying or perhaps already dead. I have no idea what to make of this ending. There one previous shot of the guy who stabs him earlier in the movie while he’s standing at the back of a room, just enough to tell the audience “this guy is important somehow!” but not enough to give us any indication of what he wants or what his motivations are. He sits there laughing as Arthur bleeds out. Is he taking over the mantle of Joker or something. Like most of the rest of this movie, the ending just seems like a random scene unconnected to anything else. In that way, I guess it’s a fitting conclusion.

Most of the costumes were pretty subdued in this film, but this one was probably the best, with just enough hints of the diamond pattern that is usually associated with the Harley Quinn character.

5 Quick Hits

Brendan Gleeson has a moment where he’s watching the trial on television (yes, the trial for a guy who shot someone on live TV and turned it into a violent spectacle was televised for some reason) and hears Fleck insult the guards and call them fat. This results in him brutally beating Arthur once he’s back at the asylum. That turn was very quick. He’s heard much worse as a guard at an asylum, and we’re to believe that that’s what made him snap? It just doesn’t play.
The songs are the most important part of any musical because it’s a trade off for the time that you could have spent with dialogue or action, and I don’t think this movie won that trade off. This might be because most of the songs weren’t written specifically for the movie, and so only are tangentially related to the scenes where they’re placed.
For the most part the costumes are very understated (most of the film is spent with guards and prisoners), but the final outfit that Lee wears at the end is the best – a black mini-skirt and red jacket, with enough hints of the diamond shaped pattern that is a hallmark of the character. The costume designers did well with that one.
The film opens with a Looney Tunes-style cartoon about Joker and his shadow. It was very weird, which I guess set the tone for the rest of the movie, but again, just added to the disjointed nature of what we were watching.
Arkham Asylum in this movie was conceived of as existing on an island in the harbour with only a long causeway connecting it to the mainland. I thought this was a great choice, and served to illustrate how disconnected the inmates were, many with only a tenuous link to reality.