A window on a world created by us.

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2019)

The acting in this film is superb. Joaquin Phoenix must surely be in line for best actor Oscar for this amazing performance and I suspect the film will garner many Oscars for all its other contributors. Everyone here has commented upon how the film shows the character's descent into into pathological evil because of the cruelty of his upbringing and the callousness of the world around him. All very true, however I see the film also as a telling allegory about modern society in the west.
We now live in a society wherein there are a lot of poor people, a dwindling middle class and a burgeoning upper class. Corporations are now largely in control of the world, regardless of the veneer of democracy in which we participate. Globalisation has robbed jobs from blue collar workers and fattened the numbers of people we now consider poor and the working poor. Corporations are making fabulous wealth by sending jobs from the west to Asia to exploit cheap labour and make stupendous profits. In the process the unregulated factories harm their works and belch pollution and dangerous chemicals into the environment...hastening the change in the world's climate.
At some point people will react against the status quo... They will become angry and descend into barbarism because they know no other way to deal with a system which no longer cares about them. There will be many Jokers then.