Short Review: Joker (2019)
★½
“Joker” has gorgeous cinematography, outstanding performances, and a riveting score but it’s all wasted on a predictable and inert script that approaches its themes with a bludgeon when it needs a scalpel. There isn’t so much a coherent narrative with something distinct to say, but an eclectic pastiche of political issues in 2010s America: gun violence, pharmaceutical drugs, income inequality, media glorification of mass shooters, social isolation, businessman politicians, mental illness, austerity, and grassroots protest movements.
Using the superhero archetype — or, more accurately here, its foil, the supervillain archetype — to explore real world politics can sometimes be fruitful, but this movie is lacking in focus and brimming with shallow gestures towards deeply complicated social ills. “Joker” should have more fully immersed itself in the subjective perspective of its titular character instead of playing around with lazily fabricated political symbolism and imagery (“kill the rich!”). And since it takes itself so freaking seriously, there is really no respite from that heavy-handed approach. Joker is not at all a character naturally suited for subtlety, but that’s all the more reason for the filmmakers to have counterbalanced that it in the filmmaking.
Not to mention the eye-rolling reveal that the convoluted events of the film were contrived in such a way as to end in yet another retelling of Batman’s origin, an even more annoying sin given that this movie isn’t even about him! I ultimately suspect that without Batman, the character of Joker is bound to wind up something like a poor imitation of Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver,” a movie whose grim content was ably replicated here, but whose careful approach to complex issues was sorely needed.
