Who Is ‘Joker: Folie À Deux’ For?

Joker: Folie À Deux criticizes devotees of 2019’s Joker through courtroom drama and musical numbers. And if that sounds weird to you, you’re right.

We’re living in a weird movie renaissance. Even though multiplexes are still filled with generic franchise films, we’ve been getting a few fascinating fresh ideas as well. Sometimes that’s a good thing with films like The Substance or I Saw the TV Glow, and sometimes that’s a unique viewing experience for different reasons, like Megalopolis, which I enjoyed but is being billed as the worst movie of the year and one of Hollywood’s biggest box office bombs.

And then sometimes, we get movies like Joker: Folie À Deux, which is both a wild-swing-style weird movie and a pretty basic movie all in one.

Joaquin Phoenix reprises his role as Arthur Fleck, who is now in prison and awaiting trial for the murders he committed in the previous film. 

Arthur’s lawyer (Catherine Keener) is gearing up to plead not guilty by reason of insanity because she believes Arthur is really just a sad, lonely man who invented Joker as a new personality to help him cope with abuse.

The general public, however, has rallied behind Joker as a symbol of the anarchy and revolution they crave. They’ve made him a celebrity—there’s a TV movie about him and everything—and he’s even famous among the prison guards, led here by Brendan Gleeson.

During one of his court-appointed psychiatry evaluations, he encounters Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a damaged woman who claims to be from his neighborhood and who shares stories of her own abusive past. He falls for her fast and the two begin a crazy romance that sees her pushing him to abandon Arthur and become the Joker full-time, much to the chagrin of his attorney.

Where the first film has a (very surface-level) commentary on mental illness, this one leans more toward manipulation, persona, fame, and perception.

And it does this while being a musical.

When you have one of the biggest pop stars in the world in the cast, you can expect some pretty strong musical sequences. When Gaga is unleashed, she truly delivers, but she’s frequently kneecapped by constant whisper-singing and a character who does little more than chain-smoke as a personality trait.

Still, one of the movie’s greatest strengths is its desire to break from 2019’s Joker and shake up audiences by taking a big swing. 

An animated short at the beginning was a highlight as well as a Sonny-and-Cher-style fantasy sequence that gives us more insight into the characters’ delusions than any other musical moments.

So much of the film seems like an explicit calling out of the people—particularly some men online—who took the previous film as some kind of instruction manual. Folie À Deux openly criticizes the people who see a lonely loser on screen and immediately proclaim “he just like me fr” while copying his every characteristic right down to the clown makeup. 

It also flips the usual Joker and Harley dynamic on its head by doing away with the standard abusive pattern and making her less of a doormat and more of a master manipulator. She’s a starfucker uninterested in the sad and broken Arthur and drawn only to the powerful symbol of Joker.

Breaking from those traditions, both the typical format of storytelling and the active criticism of the audience who helped make the previous film one of the highest-grossing R-rated films of all time, feels inventive and creative.

I only wish with rest of the movie had carried on that spirit.

While the cinematography from Lawrence Sher and score from Hildur Guðnadóttir elevate the overall quality, the screenplay from Scott Silver and director Todd Phillips falls flat in many places.

So much of the message feels basic, like those overlong YouTube essays about how people who idolize Tyler Durden have misinterpreted Fight Club. 

It’s like the first film got everyone to pay attention, and now that all eyes are on this movie, it doesn’t actually have much to say. It’s going for “weird” but it’s still far too accessible to truly deliver the bizarre experience of something like Megalopolis. It’s simple and basic with low-hanging-fruit messages but enough of a diversion in delivery that it made me question who this movie is actually for.

Surely, the people who loved the original will be upset that it feels like Phillips is mocking their excessive devotion to the film and the character. As my friend and podcast guest Angus Truskett said, the goal seems to be to alienate the fanbase. And surely the musical fans who are just there for Gaga will find all the grime and wallowing in misery boring. So who is the target audience for this movie?

I suppose as we start to see the box office returns, we’ll find out.