One Bright Spot - Joaquin Phoenix, That's Where It Ends

Rating: 2/10 (6 October 2019)

First off, Joaquin Phoenix reminded us why he's such a skilled immersive actor. He appears to do crazy quite well. But that's where it ended for me. Yes I've heard tons of people say that Joker is a masterpiece, brilliant, magnificent, blah...blah...blah. But in my opinion, it was a vicious mocking parable about mental illness. It directly connected mental illness and violence. If a person is mentally ill, then the likelihood that they'll eventually turn into a full-blown murderous psychopath is almost a 100% according to this film. Joker does nothing but further stigmatize mental illness, and it is a tired, worn-out destructive trope that Hollywood simply can't seem to move away from.
Arthur Fleck (the Joker) is a broken, emotionally spent man, who has been dealt a series of bad hands in life. He's poor, lives in a depressed neighborhood, has a failed career as a clown, a sick mother (who we later learn has lied to him all of his life), been bullied unmercifully and is looking for some sort of human connection as he walks around Gotham (New York City in the 70s/early 80's). But this is a story that a lot of people can tell, but by no means does that say they're pushed to murder. Most folks take their meds, get therapy and work their way out of their unfortunate circumstances. Joker is also a story that has been told in films multiple times, and this film steals heavily from The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver and surprise, Robert De Niro is in the Joker.
Then you have the other go-to Hollywood tropes....the single Black mother played by Zazie Beetz (Fleck's fantasy love interest, don't get me started with this), the angry Black woman, the distant unfeeling, uncaring Black woman, and by the way, none of these women were used as plot devices, they were simply convenient props. Oh, and lets throw in a little class warfare and wealth disparity to put the period at the end of the sentence of tropes.
Anyone thinking that this is another incarnation of the comic book Joker characters we've seen before, will either be greatly disappointed or resoundingly relieved. There's no suited and booted superhero, no cool gadgets, no bat cave, no bat mobile or bat signal. This film is a dark, unsettling, meandering look at Fleck's descent into self-destruction and homicide, with the backdrop of old school New York City's grime, despair, poverty and filth. Joker is a stand-alone, brutal psychological thriller that simply wears out its welcome very quickly. But it'll make a ton of money, and no matter how mocking this film is of mental illness and Black women, money is really all that matters in Hollywood.