“An uneven film that has its crescendos, but mostly strikes basic and even atonal chords.”

In Joker, Todd Phillips’ atypical superhero origin story centered on one of Batman’s arch nemeses, instead of going the typical spandex route, the director took a surprise left turn by creating a character study that made broad social commentary and created discourse in the Film Twitter sphere and beyond. Its huge success, which won Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for the titular role, almost forced Phillips and Warner Bros. to come up with a sequel. Continuing the story more or less where we left it at the end of the original film, with Arthur Fleck arrested and institutionalized, Joker: Folie à Deux pairs Arthur up with a love interest (as the title suggests), but surprisingly chooses to tell the story as a prison-cum-courtroom drama to create a work that leaves one wondering: who is the audience for this film?

With Joaquin Phoenix reprising his role with impressive technical prowess and even more impressive physical transformation, certainly compared to the man who is here on the Lido promoting the film, Arthur Fleck is locked up in a high-security mental institution awaiting his trial. Somewhat of a model prisoner, he is allowed by a brutal warden (Brendan Gleeson, in a surprising role) to join the musical classes of a wing in the institution with less restrictions on the inmates. It is there that he runs into Lee (Lady Gaga); sparks fly and two lost souls find each other. An attempt to escape together is thwarted, and a TV interview with a prodding journalist (Steve Coogan) goes awry, but none of this deteriorates the popularity of Fleck’s alter ego Joker, both outside the prison and with his fellow inmates; a form of notoriety and celebrity that allows Arthur certain perks. His well-intentioned lawyer (Catherine Keener) makes a good pitch at the start of his trial, but a freshly released Lee who is banking on her relationship with Arthur, pushes him to go on the offense. As a string of witnesses that harken back to the first film (Zazie Beetz’s Sophie, Arthur’s neighbor; his friend Puddles, played by Leigh Gill) take the stand, Arthur drops his lawyer to take his defense into his own hands. Not being a lawyer, he turns his closing arguments into a confession of sorts, which alienates both Lee and his adoring fans inside and outside the courtroom. His fate seems sealed, but could he have a deus-ex-machina last laugh?

Oh, and it’s a musical.

What is most befuddling about Joker: Folie à Deux is its form. Both the prison and the courtroom setting suck most of the life out of the film, which it tries to correct by injecting energy back into the proceedings through numerous musical numbers. The popular show tunes are for the most part incorporated organically (often through Arthur’s imagination) but are not always congruent with the story the film is trying to tell, and in particular not in the way it tries to tell it. Liberally borrowing from the staples of two genres, from Shawshank Redemption to Matlock of all things, the musical interludes cannot untie the film from the tried and tested tropes of said genres, which makes for a pretty lifeless and predictable affair. In a film about an unpredictable character, certainly when the first film presented him as such, that is a death knell. What is surprising is that nobody really benefits from the musical elements, definitely not the bigger set pieces: not Phoenix, whose voice is not the strongest if he really has to belt, but also not Gaga, whose vocals are obviously on point but who does not really know how to act in the grand song-and-dance moments. Only a gospel version of ‘Gonna Build a Mountain’, made popular in several renditions by, among others, Sammy Davis Jr. and The Monkees, shows her real talent as a performer. More intimate songs do show her vocal chops, definitely the more jazzy or soulful ones, but it is actually the subdued character moments where she doesn’t have to sing in which she shines; in those scenes Gaga does perhaps her best acting to date. Phoenix’s approach is very mannered, which the theatricality of both Joker and Arthur Fleck calls for, although the performance, while not phoned in, does show the wheels turning in the actor’s head. His is a great performance, but one that is love-or-hate and unlikely to net him a second Oscar win (or even nomination) because of its similarity to the original version.

The film’s thematical arc carried through from 2019’s Joker is, while painted in broad strokes, a laudable reflection of Western society and the political and societal developments in an age of social media and celebrity culture. Whereas the first film propped up Joker as a sort of misunderstood hero of the masses trying to topple the establishment in an anarchical, fuck-the-system approach, the stanning of larger-than-life figures like Joker and the streaks of populism that come along with this are definitely a big theme in this film, and also definitely not shown as a net positive; the ‘revolution’ of the underclasses of Joker, presented as a leftist revolutionary movement avant la lettre, is shown to have developed into a blind adoration of a Messiah-like character much like the MAGA movement in the US hangs onto everything Donald Trump says. The Jesus symbolism is most prominent in a Judas kiss early in the film, an almost playful moment that reverberates in the film’s ending, although it is debatable who the Judas is in this scenario: the inmate who asks Arthur for the smooch, or Arthur himself revealing the split personality defense his lawyer used for strategy as a hoax. The foundation for the film tapping its way around this question of split personalities is laid from the beginning, in a Looney Tunes-inspired short animated film in which Joker wrestles with his shadow who is trying to take over his place. The film dances (quite literally, even) around this issue until bluntly resolving it, where a continued ambiguity would have worked better even if that would have required a different ending. One can argue that Arthur’s confession is a last effort to correct course by a man who sees the dangers of the adulation for his persona, but for that argument to stand the film offers too small a basis.

Much of the popularity of this property’s first outing stems from the ‘outsider’ perspective of Joker fighting against ‘the system’, with a pitiable protagonist who gives the representation of said neoliberal, ‘fuck-you-got-mine’ system in the form of the bullies he encounters on the subway: what it, in the eyes of the both the film’s and his in-universe fans, deserves. Like Joker’s fandom in the film, Harley Quinn included, the admirers of the first film might be disappointed by the character’s arc in this second episode. Likewise, those who don’t like musicals (and there are many) might be unpleasantly surprised by the number of moments when characters burst into song, a fact Warner Bros. seems to desperately try to hide in the film’s promotion. Those craving the energy of the original might be let down by the stale and frankly quite boring setting of jail and courtroom. So who will the audience be that brings Joker: Folie à Deux the success of the first film? Phillips takes a wild gamble in the way he tells his story, and the question is whether this gamble will pay off. As it stands, Joker: Folie à Deux at times feels like a rehash of previous success by bringing back recognizable characters as well as the most recognizable location (those endless stairs), fit in a corset of genre tropes that it attempts to offset by doing the most unexpected in turning it into a musical. At times this works, when performers and directorial vision create moments of visual and emotional strength, but at other times the film cannot really justify the reasoning behind its choices. This makes for an uneven film that has its crescendos, but mostly strikes basic and even atonal chords.