Projecting the Joker motif into a puerile social commentary, Todd Philip's film is an abrasive, thematically incoherent film buoyed by a masterful performance by Joaquin Phoenix. Formalistically the film's sensibilities embrace the early 1980s NYC epoch with an aesthetic which perfectly encapsulates the time-period, a vibrant temporal setting for the prologue of the Batman/Joker ethos to be explored. This aspect of the film is an accomplishment when viewed in this context yet it becomes increasingly at odds with the director's thematic ambitions, ambitions which are transparent in their reactionary nature to a very specific temporal place in contemporary culture. Joker in this sense feels almost at odds with itself, being a clever construction of the Joker ethos but one which is downright insulting when it comes to forming any nuanced or intelligent social critique. These two layers - Joker's origin story vs. social commentary - of course could work together in a different film, yet there is an arrogance to this film's thematic intent that is so juvenile in its understanding of social movements/unrest & mental illness that is downright offensive due to its absolutely absurd portrayal of these two specific issues which affect contemporary society. The film stigmatizes mental illness in a way which intentionally or not suggests it's one-in-the-same with psychosis, while also largely making no sense in its social commentary which I don't even have the energy to detail here for the sake of MY mental health. Simply put, Todd Phillips was trying to be provocative but really it's just insulting to the audience, naive and at its worst, offensive. The irony to me about this film is there is a lot of interesting elements - performance, aesthetic, a clever subversion of the Batman mythos - yet it comes off feeling more like a filmmaker with a personal vendetta, using his platform to whine about the state of society today without even attempting to put any effort into understanding the vast tentacles of social movements, injustice, mental illness, etc, etc, etc.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|