Joker: Folie à Deux Review: Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix Make ...

By the time Joker: Folie à Deux stumbles from musical to half-cooked courtroom drama, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has reemerged as the title villain. Sitting before the jury, caked in clownface, Joker prepares his closing statements after being tried for the murder of five people in the first film—including the shooting of late-night host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) on primetime television. The presiding judge, aggravated by all the hijinx, issues a reminder: “This is not a comedy club. You are not on stage.” Joker, mournful and menacing, tilts his head and stares directly into the nearest camera. We watch as his sad-sack mug is broadcast on tube televisions across Gotham.

This moment lies at the gnawed core of Folie à Deux, director Todd Phillips’ sequel to his billion-dollar DC Comics origin story, Joker. That film traced the decline of Arthur Fleck—battered clown, aspiring stand-up, stalker—and the rise of a homicidal anti-hero. In Phillips’ second, and final, installment, the imprisoned, meager Arthur is revitalized upon meeting Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a fellow ward at Arkham Asylum. Their real-life romance is squalid and hopeless, but, in Arthur’s daydreams, the deranged inmate-soulmates sing, dance, and raise hell with the Old Hollywood panache of a Gene Kelly picture.

“Underneath it all, there’s an idea of corruption.… From the prison system to the judicial system to the idea of entertainment,” Phillips told reporters following Folie à Deux’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival last month. “In the States, at least, everything is entertainment, you know? A court trial could be entertainment, and a presidential election can be entertainment. So, if that’s true, what is entertainment?” Phillips does not reach his desired depths with Folie à Deux, as it feels like he and his writing partner, Scott Silver, tried to stretch the setup of “That’s Entertainment,” the smash-hit from Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon, into a feature film. The conceit—that “the world is a stage,” that murders and missteps and flings are all theater—wears thin in Phillips and Silvers’ hands.

“That’s Entertainment” is one of several oldies and show tunes sung by Gaga and Phoenix throughout the movie, both in Technicolor reveries and quietly unhinged mots d’amour. When Arthur catches sight of Lee, she is singing “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” in a music therapy group at Arkham Asylum; the guards and prisoners whistle and shout a recurring motif of “When the Saints Go Marching In”; upon meeting Arthur face-to-face, Lee squeaks out a hushed verse of Judy Garland’s “Get Happy.” A resounding “Huh?!” rang out when the Joker sequel was announced as a musical, but the song-and-dance sequences are the only functioning gears of the film. (Phillips and his stars’ recent claims that the film is “not a musical,” are plainly absurd.) I’d applaud the classic songbook and the performances from Phoenix and Gaga before the work of Phillips or Silver, who slapped some razzle-dazzle onto a fetid script. But you can’t razzle-dazzle a turd.

Gaga has made much ado about “unlearning” how to sing for her role in Folie à Deux, and has repeatedly referred to finding “Lee’s voice”—the cracked, girlish timbre she uses for measures of “Close to You” and “I’ve Got the World on a String.” It seemed unlikely that Gaga could abandon her classically trained chops for the film, but, to her credit, she strips back the varnish… most of the time. After Lee sets a piano ablaze in the asylum rec room, she and Arthur make a run for it, dodging guards in a Buster Keaton slapstick routine as Lee belts “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity. Gaga wisely plays it down the middle, bellowing like a Broadway deviant but letting a few notes go bust as she and Arthur scale a fence. The following number is an original waltz Gaga penned for the film; she re-recorded the song, along with selections from the film’s soundtrack, for her recent companion album, Harlequin.

Gaga made Harlequin because she wanted to plunge deeper into her character and the world of the film. You can’t blame her; outside of Arthur’s MGM fever dreams, Gaga’s Lee is given little to do. She checks in on her incarcerated beau and tries to awaken his inner madman, though the motivation behind her Jokermania is never made clear. Still, Gaga does what she can with the material, performing with more restraint than I expected following her outsized role in House of Gucci and A Star Is Born’s inherent schmaltz. She plays Lee with a soft madness, her eyes always glazed over in contained rage. In one of the film’s few (successful) comic moments, Lee watches Arthur singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” on multiple television sets in a shop window. After gently saying “excuse me,” she nudges past two men, hurls a trashcan through the glass, and scampers off with one of the TVs. Her physical performance, subtle and twitching, eclipses the occasionally clunky line-reading.

Phoenix, one of the finest and most transformative actors of his generation, finally won an Academy Award for his heavy-handed Joker performance in the 2019 film. In the sequel, he has the opportunity to play it a bit more subdued, as Arthur is behind bars and heavily medicated in the first act. Phoenix doesn’t speak in the film’s opening minutes, but his hunched body language is roaring with pain and pathos. Having once again shed many pounds for the role, Phoenix is a pointy scaffold of skin and skeleton, often stripped to his knickers and arching his body in grotesque shapes. The sheer number of these shots is hackneyed, but Phoenix’s mutation into Arthur Fleck is hard to ignore.

He is equally magnetic as Gaga’s ramshackle counterpart, playing the wayward showman in a handful of musical scenes. During a rendition of “Gonna Build a Mountain,” the duo puts on a show that mimics Soul Train, complete with backup dancers and Gaga banging on piano. Phoenix, in his full Joker regalia, does a little tap routine at center stage, loose-limbed and oozing charm. Phoenix’s most strained acting choices emerge when he’s playing Joker on trial; the compulsive laughing fits, the decision to go full Atticus Finch while defending himself in court, the lines of dialogue that suddenly splat on the floor. In these moments, it’s clear that Phillips cannot truly craft complex characters like Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. He forgets that real human yearning always motivates the monster.

Folie à Deux’s musical interludes may stand on their own, but Phillips fails to cushion them with a decent narrative. Most of the action plays out in song, and, therefore, in a daydream. The reality of the film takes place in a correctional facility and a courtroom, where violence and misery tango wantonly. There is no space to sit with an outburst of police brutality, or a raw confession on the witness stand, because Phillips insists on whisking us away to another Sondheim hallucination. As with Joker, Folie à Deux will slaughter a character and invite you to gawp: Isn’t it twisted? In one inane plot point, an explosion goes off. Cue a character gushing: “You said you wanted to blow it all up… and somebody blew it the fuck up!” Phillips is a sledgehammer filmmaker, clobbering his audience over the head repeatedly until he’s certain they got it. You might say it’s too much. Phillips might say, “That’s entertainment!”