Give the man a stronger prescription!

Rating: 6/10 (30 December 2019)

Here is a story about mental illness, society's ignorance of it, and the horrible price we pay for turning a contemptuous eye.
As the movie begins, we sympathize with a floridly disturbed man who ekes out a living as a clown, getting ridiculed and abused at every turn. Played by a wiry, bare-chested Joaquin Phoenix, Arthur asks his state-assigned therapist for some more medication, but she doesn't really care about his case, and soon Arthur is running the streets, not really giving a fig, in his turn, about the mayhem he's about to wreak.
When a trio of obnoxious Wall Streeters taunts Arthur on a subway, he sets off on a terrifying crime rampage fueled by the fantasy of love with a single mother who lives down the hall (Zazie Beetz). All of this takes place against the backdrop of a coarsening, anarchistic society that is reaping what it has sown.
There is terror in "Joker" because we never really know what's going on in Arthur's mind, yet we sense it isn't good. I think the movie falters a bit, and stretches itself out unnecessarily, by focusing too obsessively on Arthur's maniacal laughter and chain smoking. Why turn him into such a freak?
The performances here are uniformly strong. Phoenix comes across as inscrutable, unpredictable, a human loose cannon. Also chilling is a plastic Robert DeNiro as talk-show host Murray Franklin, who gives Arthur a platform, not because he values him, but as fodder for his jibes.
Franklin is blind to the perils of behaving so savagely. Let's hope our culture can learn something from his shocking fate.