Joker (2019) review

Joker contains one of the best performances of the decade inside one of the most derivative films of the decade. The gap between those two facts is the entire critical conversation about it, and it is a gap that no amount of technical polish closes.

The Performance

Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor for this and the award is not in question. His Arthur Fleck is a physically specific creation: the involuntary laughter, the shoulder blades, the way he runs, the way he holds his hands. He lost a great deal of weight for the role and the emaciation is not cosmetic — it communicates a man whose body has already begun to fail him.

The performance is also the film's only source of ambiguity. Arthur is written as a figure who becomes a symbol he never intended to become, and Phoenix plays the moments where that happens — the Murray Franklin show, the police car, the crowd — with genuine bewilderment. That reading is available in the performance even though the film's script does not really support it, and it is the reason the film is more interesting than its screenplay.

Read more about drama cinema in our Drama genre hub, explore the work of Todd Phillips in our directors section, or see where this film lands in best films of the 2010s.

The Borrowings

The film's debt to Scorsese is not subtle. Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are the primary sources, and the borrowings extend to specific shots, tonal choices, and the casting of Robert De Niro. Todd Phillips has been open about the influence, describing the film as a character study in that tradition, but the film's relationship to its sources is closer to pastiche than to dialogue.

The consequence is that Joker often feels like a film made by someone who loves a particular kind of cinema without fully understanding what made it work. Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle is a specific product of a specific New York, and his violence is presented as a symptom of a world the film has actually built. Joker's Gotham is generic decay, and its violence is presented as inevitable rather than examined.

Craft and Phoenix's Surroundings

The film's technical elements are strong. Lawrence Sher's photography is controlled and the colour palette is coherent, and Hildur Guðnadóttir's cello-based score won an Oscar and is genuinely effective. The film's production design makes Gotham a plausible late-1970s New York, and the period detail is careful.

The supporting cast is largely wasted. Zazie Beetz's Sophie is a device rather than a character, and the film's treatment of her — including a reveal that removes her agency entirely — is one of its more criticised choices. Frances Conroy does what she can with a role that exists to deliver exposition about Arthur's past, and De Niro's Murray Franklin is underused. Phoenix is carrying the film alone, and he does, but the imbalance is visible.

The Politics Problem

The film wants to be about the abandonment of the mentally ill by a society that only notices them when they become violent, and it gestures at that idea repeatedly without committing to it. Arthur's condition is never named. The cuts to mental health services are mentioned once. The film's actual argument, if it has one, is closer to 'society made him do it' than to any coherent critique.

That vagueness is what allowed the film to be read as a manifesto by the people it was supposedly criticising, which is a reception problem the filmmakers did not anticipate. Joker is not a dangerous film, and the panic around its release now looks disproportionate. But it is a film without a thesis, and its refusal to say anything specific is why it has not aged as well as Phoenix's performance deserves.

Themes and ideas

• Social abandonment
• The invention of a symbol
• Mental illness and public perception
• Media and violence