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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.
