Beware: this article features Joker: Folie à Deux spoilers.
What’s black and white and red all over? Joker: Folie à Deux, the desaturated sequel to Joker, which is currently undergoing a public beating. A measly weekend haul of $37.8 million in the US! A CinemaScore rating – based on audience surveys – of D! Both are probably very unfunny to Warner Bros executives.
It seems unlikely, even given a healthier international haul of $80 million, that Joker: Folie à Deux will live up in any way to its prequel which earned a billion dollars (a billion dollars!) and netted Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for Best Clown (sorry, actor). But you know who might have the last chuckle? Todd Phillips.
You could not accuse the director, so adored for 2019’s Joker and currently being pilloried for ruining that film’s legacy, for phoning it in. In the latest episode of Esquire’s Freeze Frame, Phillips is insightful about his film, which charts Arthur Fleck’s (Phoenix) stint in Arkham Asylum as he prepares for trial and learns to live alongside his Joker alter-ego.
Phillips goes deep on the casting—Steve Coogan’s ghoulish journalist, Brendan Gleeson as a manipulative asylum guard, Lady Gaga’s dour take on Harley Quinn (who goes by the name of Lee)—to one of the movie’s prevailing themes, which he calls the “corruption of entertainment”.
He is talking specifically about the scene in which Coogan’s character interviews Arthur about his misbehaviour in the previous film (he murdered five people). The low-rent journo clearly trying to get a rise out of our beleaguered anti-hero, who cannot help mugging to the camera.
As Phillips says, “In the States, often we put trials on television. We’ll put a murderer like Arthur on TV and sell adverts during the interview. We’ll have presidential elections with graphics that make it look like a wrestling match. If everything is entertainment, what is actually entertainment?”
Good question! Clearly not Joker: Folie à Deux, according to Joker fans. They were not keen for a courtroom drama. Or Lady Gaga in her least Lady Gaga-like role. Or the downbeat ending where Fleck is—spoiler alert—stabbed by a fellow asylum patient known as “Psycho” (well, he is not nicknamed “Cuddly”).
Does the film have the verve of its prequel? Bar a few arresting sequences—like when the asylum guards’ grey umbrellas appear multicoloured from Arthur’s perspective—it certainly doesn’t have Joker’s element of surprise (unless you were expecting a villain origin story under the influence of Scorsese). The musical aspect is intriguing, but Phillips and his cast have been adamant that this film is not one, and I am inclined to agree: musicals should feature some peppier tunes and fewer renditions of “Oh When The Saints Go Marching In”.
The best part of this film, in this writer’s superhero-averse eyes, is what it attempts to say about fame. Arthur, who had become a hero to losers (on and off-screen), in the first movie, finds himself at a crossroads in the second. He’s more famous than he could have dreamt—his trial is being televised, his burgeoning romance with Lee makes the front pages—but more tormented than ever before.
His lawyer, played by Catherine Keener, is trying to persuade the courtroom (and Arthur himself) that he has a split personality and needs better treatment (does that exist in Gotham?). Meanwhile, his lame fans wait outside the courtroom, worshipping a version of Arthur that exists—sometimes? In the past? Certainly, when Arthur takes the stand, to the applause of his adoring fans, Joker is absent. The man stammers to an expectant room, completely sans braggadocio.
“Folie à Deux” (maybe the best thing about this film is the title?) refers to a joint psychosis. Sure, that could refer to Arthur and Lee. But more compelling is the delusion shared by Arthur and his fans.
This week, I watched The Franchise, a brisk TV comedy from Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes, about the making of a doomed superhero movie. The series is an entertaining look at how Marvel fodder is churned out: decisions by far-off committees, pandering to intense fans, overworked CGI departments.
You end up with ugly, boring mush, even if you have helicoptered in an arthouse European director. Watching that show, I found myself warming to Joker: Folie à Deux: it is clearly beyond redemption for many thanks to its weird perspectives, but at least did not commit the sin of not having one at all. Maybe a few jokes next time?
Originally published on Esquire UK
Finally, we get the teaser to the long-anticipated sequel to Joker (no article, please; that's how the film rolls) and it's something. Called Joker: Folie á Deux, the film takes place directly after Joker. We follow Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix), who is getting used to life behind bars. That is, until he sets his sad puppy dog peepers on Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga). Cue the fireworks.
Folie á deux is French for "shared madness" and it's inevitable that Arthur and Harley's fate might mirror that of another pair of loving maniacs (think Mickey and Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers). What's interesting is that Harley isn't a playing a psychologist. Rather, from the teaser, it looks like she's a fellow patient at the asylum—wait, do people still say "asylum"? And it looks to have a lot of dancing and singing. In several sequences of a burst of colours and song, the cinematography is reminiscent of the musicals of the '60s.
Director Todd Philips, who is known for his The Hangover trilogy, Joker and his cameo in Old School that we will always bring up (see gif for reference), says in an interview at CinemaCon that this isn't a musical but "it’s a film where music is an essential element." He then adds that, "it’ll make sense when [we] see it." We are guessing, dream sequences that only Arthur and Haryley are privy to.
Other actors appearing in the sequel includes Zazie Beetz reprising the role of Arthur's former love interest; Leigh Gill returns as Arthur's clown coworker as well as Sharon Washington, Arthur's social worker. Seeing as how Robert De Niro's character ended up in the last instalment, we can rule out his appearance. Unless he appears in Arthur's imagination or something.
Joker: Folie á Deux is scheduled for theatres 4 October
Genuinely, I'm sorry to do this, but you really need some context before we dive into my experience watching Napoleon. In freshman year history class, Mr. C demanded that I memorise the capital city of each and every state in this damned country. For reasons that amounted to "fuck this weird-baseball-coach-slash-history-teacher" and "fuck Little Rock and Topeka and Bismark and Montpelier," I made a clear-eyed decision to cheat my way through the next four years of high school history. When we hit Napoleon and the French Revolution, I think, I was copying tests from Frank and Gage. (If you're reading this, Frage... thank you.)
It's a long way around to telling you that, last week, I saw—or, bore witness to—director Ridley Scott's Napoleon. There I was, a 30-year-old man with popcorn butter stains on his sweatpants at the Times Square Regal E-Walk, wondering if there's any historical basis for Napoleon oinking at Joséphine when he wants to get nasty. Could this be history? I mused.
Reader, Napoleon is really fucking weird. It's easy to understand why critics seem so confused. A film that was advertised as the "Dad Movie of the Century" sways between tones like a boozy night on the Atlantic! To give you an idea of the experience, Napoleon is two hours and 38 minutes long. First act: We're introduced to the Napoleon your girlfriend tells you not to worry about. When his horse gets a cannonball to the chest, he asks someone to dig out the cannonball so he can keep it as a memento. Second act: Napoleon done in the style of a Bowen Yang-led Saturday Night Live! skit where the quippy, wounded emperor oinks when he's horny. Third act: Waterloo.
At different points in the film, my fellow audience members were either cackling or hush-quiet. They giggled at Bonaparte's takedown of the Austrian emperor or in awe of Scott's signature historical set-pieces. After seeing the long, yet hyper-focused Killers of the Flower Moon and The Holdovers's uncomplicated mushiness, Napoleon baffled me. I can't stop thinking about it, in a men-are-always-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire kind of way. Of all the films I've seen this year, it was the one I couldn't stop myself from recapping around Esquire's offices to anyone who would listen.
The next day, I paid a visit to our managing editor—and noted reader of historical biographies—John Kenney, and brought up a number of questions I have for Napoleon, all of which haunted my eighth-grade-level history chops:
John, bless his soul, politely watched me blabber on. He didn't offer much background either way, because either I wasn't making sense, or Napoleon didn't make sense. (If we're being honest, probably both.)
It's possible—maybe even likely—that Scott intended Napoleon as one big roast of one very little man. This man, who (as we are reminded at the end of the film) ignited wars that caused millions of casualties. So he leaned into the creepo Napoleon (Creepoleon? That something?), who was most vulnerable when he was with Joséphine. Especially the letters: "I write you, me beloved one, very often, and you write very little. You are wicked and naughty, very naughty, as much as you are fickle."
Maybe Scott thought that going full Band of Brothers on the Napoleonic Wars would reach hero-worship territory. But that doesn' explain why the last hour or so, Napoleon is exactly that. Replete with an epic Ridley Scott battle, with plenty of guns, formations, stabbing, and death. Or, perhaps Napoleon's unevenness must thank Phoenix's take on the Frenchman, which has a little bit too much Joker and Beau in the alchemy. (Another hilarious, if dubious delivery from Phoenix, delivered at top-of-lungs decibels: "YOU THINK YOU'RE SO GREAT BECAUSE YOU HAVE BOATS!")
If you're looking for a neat, tidy takeaway for this one, I don't have it. All I know is that in between bites of turkey during this Thanksgiving, I'll wonder if Bonaparte actually needed a stepladder to properly view a mummy, and secretly wish that the turkey was a lamb chop. Ask me again next year, folks.