Joker

An attempt to give a backstory to a character who probably doesn’t need one, “Joker” gives us a very late-seventies-early-eighties-New York looking Gotham City, as failing, mentally damaged party clown Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is battered by society repeatedly until, one day, he shoots three stockbrokers who are teasing him on the subway. As the local reaction to his act gets ever louder, his confrontations with his past and present condition grow ever deadlier until everything boils over in an outpouring of violence.

This has all the clothing of a serious movie – the gritty setting, Phoenix’s deep immersion in the character, grim photography, an avoidance of the glossy excess that has marked other Batman-related films. But it also trades in so much ambiguity as to what’s going on inside and outside Fleck’s head that in the end it never really says anything at all clearly beyond that traumatised people pass on trauma. In particular, the Robert DeNiro sequences rely on some fairly unlikely plotting just so the film can pull off a not-very-successful “King of Comedy” riff – and the tie-ins to Batman mythology tend to be messy and reaching for relevance. I don’t believe in this grimmer-than-grim take on existence any more than I believe in other superhero fantasies happy-go-lucky take on things, and the main difference is that this is less fun and more ponderous. So no, this is not a film I particularly went for.