Joker: Folie à Deux Feels Like a Movie for No One

A movie can be a major downer and still carry no emotional weight. That’s the sad, stoop-shouldered truth of Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’ follow-up to his explosively popular 2019 vigilante extravaganza Joker. The picture has so little energy that it sags off the screen—it’s as droopy as the sad, psychiatric-prison underpants worn by its depressed, underfed hero, Arthur Fleck, played once again by Joaquin Phoenix. (He won the Most-Acting Oscar for his portrayal of this character the first time around.) Folie à Deux is somewhat violent, with a few off-camera beatings and a fantasy shooting spree or two, but it comes nowhere near the earlier movie’s deadpan, shockeroo “look how empty our world is today” nihilism. Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver have tried to do something daring here, by delivering a somber movie that in no way tries to top its predecessor. But intentions don’t equal fully fledged works, and Folie à Deux stumbles on nearly all fronts. Even if the movie’s ambitions are admirable, you might end up too bored to care.

This time around Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, the troubled killer suffering from some vaguely defined split-personality order, is now incarcerated in the maximum-security wing of Arkham State Hospital as he awaits his trial for the five murders—make that six—he committed in the earlier movie. Slumped and sad and alarmingly emaciated, Arthur dutifully takes his daily meds; these keep him on an even keel, making him an especially vulnerable target for the hospital’s sadistic guards. (They’re led by a cartoonishly leering Brendan Gleeson.) The good news is that Arthur has a kind, sympathetic lawyer, Catherine Keener’s Maryanne Stewart. And he may even have a shot at finding love: while being escorted on a rare jaunt through the hospital’s minimum-security ward, where they keep the lesser loonies, he catches the eye of a dispirited-looking patient in a droopy cardigan. Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) recognizes Arthur immediately, not just from news reports of his murderous exploits as his alter-ego Joker, but also from a TV movie that’s been made about him. She falls hard, instilling hope in him too. Later, back in his own dismal hospital ward, he warbles the lyrics to “For Once in My Life,” as the guards chortle heartlessly.

The focus here is on Arthur’s vulnerability, and at first, Lee—later to become some version of the character known, in Batman lore, as Harley Quinn—seems truly drawn to his sweet, if cracked, naivete. Lee has been committed for setting fire to her parents’ apartment building. Now she’s setting Arthur’s heart aflame. They meet again when Arthur is invited to the minimum-security ward’s common room to watch Stanley Donen's 1953 classic The Band Wagon with the other inmates. (It’s just one of a trillion movie references, from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Looney Tunes to Psycho, crammed into the movie like colored pegs in a Lite-Brite board.) But Lee becomes restless during the screening; she wants to get up to mischief. Arthur demurs, not wanting to leave before the movie's big “That’s Entertainment!” number. This is the moment he ought to know, as we do, that Lee is all wrong for him: under no circumstances does one stop watching The Band Wagon midway through.

But Lee gets her way. After she creates a commotion by setting fire to the common room’s piano, the two flee the hospital for a brief taste of freedom before they’re hauled back. By this point, Arthur is hooked. He dreams of Lee, inventing colorful song-and-dance scenarios in which the two of them cavort manically—though in these dreams, he’s always the Joker, never Arthur. There’s a 1970s variety-show-style number in which they duet on the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody”; in another, Arthur-as-Joker performs a wack-a-doodle tap-dance number. Folie à Deux is a certified musical even though, in the several years leading up to its release, Phillips has tried to back away from that genre distinction. He probably has some sense of how many I-hate-musicals people are out there, especially among those who favor movies adapted from comic books, and he wouldn’t want to risk alienating them.

He needn’t have worried. The musical numbers in Folie à Deux—particularly those fantasy sequences, rendered in hard-candy colors—are the liveliest thing about it, though not even they are enough to jolt the movie out of its morose lockstep. The movie is largely set in drab Arkham and a stately courtroom. There’s a lot of Arthur and very little Joker. Because, as Phillips feels the need to remind us, the world doesn’t love Arthur Fleck; it loves the unhinged, murderous comic who, in Joker, plugged a derisive talk-show host on live TV. And it turns out that’s the version of Arthur preferred by Lee, too. If, in the first movie, Arthur was the shy, weird loser rejected by all women, now he’s being bamboozled by one. It's the ultimate fulfillment of an incel’s view of women: they’re the enemy, plain and simple.

Phillips ultimately brings the movie to a sad, dark place that’s likely to please—or even move—no one. The ending of Joker: Folie à Deux was enough to make me feel a little sad for fans of the earlier film, which I loathed. This was what they’d been looking forward to for the past few years? Lady Gaga springs to something like life during the musical numbers, as you’d expect. Mostly, though, she’s curiously muted. When questioned about her adoration for the unwell sad-sack Arthur, Lee responds, her eyes crazy as a kit-cat clock, “He’s not sick, he’s perfect.” Phillips and Silver have one of our most captivating performers in their clutches, and this is the best dialogue they can come up with?

Phoenix, at least, has a little more to work with. With his sunken eye sockets and angular jawline, he looks like a cross between Rod Serling, the young Johnny Cash, and a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln. Phoenix has actually played one of those characters before, in James Mangold’s 2005 Cash biopic Walk the Line; it’s one of his finest performances. He’s a wonderfully perceptive actor, never afraid to wander off in an oddball direction. Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, Gus van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, a number of fruitful collaborations with James Gray, including the cross-cultural romance Two Lovers: Phoenix has given extraordinary performances in any number of disparate movies, some of which have been sorely underappreciated. Even in Ridley Scott’s utterly ridiculous Napoleon, he makes a pretty good part-fact, part-fantasy Bonaparte, a brilliant Military strategist who becomes a mumbling saphead in the presence of his lady love Josephine.

As he did in the earlier film, Phoenix lost some 50 pounds to play Arthur. More than once we see him shirtless, his shoulder blades jutting out like malformed epaulettes. It comes off less like commitment than overkill. (Phoenix has admitted that the weight loss was harder on his body this time around, partly because of the demanding dance rehearsals. He has also acknowledged, wryly, that this sort of rapid weight loss isn’t the sort of thing he should be doing anymore as he nears 50.) As Arthur, Phoenix is suitably pitiful; as the Joker, he grandstands predictably. There’s nothing fresh or compelling about anything Phoenix brings to the movie, yet it hardly seems to be his fault. If you took pleasure, even the perverse kind, in Arthur-as-Joker’s depraved antics in Joker, you’ll find the portions in Folie à Deux more meager and far less satisfying. With Folie à Deux, Phillips gives fans a come-down that essentially punishes them for enjoying the volatile energy of the first film. It's more a corrective than a sequel, a Go Directly to Jail card in movie form.