The Taxi Driver remake we needed in the age of Ultron

Rating: 8/10 (7 October 2019)

This film is, first and foremost, a revisiting of Taxi Driver. Which right off the bat should echo with the concerns of those who criticize this film for being derivative.
Yes, Joker is in many ways a remake of Taxi Driver for contemporary mainstream movie-goers, which uses the super-hero genre as an entry point for discussing serious social issues that would have likely been too taboo for basically any other major Hollywood superproduction of recent memory (save maybe Logan and Mad Max: Fury Road)
Yes, this is a (partial) remake of Taxi Driver.
The real question: is this necessarily a bad thing?
I won't pick apart all the subtle differences and less than subtle similarities between this film and Scorcese's take on the mass-murderering male. I will merely say that Joker seems to me, if nothing else, a labor of love for a type of socially conscious hollywood film that seems, in the age of flashy marvel "super-men" and "super-women", to be somewhat of an anachronism, but as I argue, a necessary one.
This film neither glamorizes far-right terrorism, as has been claimed, nor bestows an undue sympathy on misogynists or skinheads by virtue of their being misogynists or skinheads. Regardless of what such men may find of appeal in this film, simply put, Joaquín Phoenix's Joker is none of the above, and yet at the same time a vessel for helping to understanding all of the above as part of a broader critique of a society that produces poverty, privilege, ultrav-iolence, and sociopathic loneliness in equal measure.
It is a film that seeks to broach the often taboo subjects of class conflict, violence, and pharmaco-carceral police states in such a way that both pays homage to the films from the 19070's it explicitly cites (Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and repurposes their thought-provoking criticism for the age of Trump.
Joaquín Phoenix may channel Charlie Chaplin's tramp and Robert DeNiro's psychopath in equal parts, but make no mistake: this Joker is neither an incel, nor a Trump supporter. He is, quite literally, someone who stands with "the 99%", and that that shoots someone who sounds like and looks like and looks like he has about as much money and privilege and toxic spite for women as one of Donald Trump's sons.
Joker is, like Travis Bickle, a terrorist, of sorts. A man who lives out his particular male toxicity through testosterone-induced chivalric fantasies of domination and "salvation" (namely, of women of his social class perceived to be "damsels" in need of immediate rescue). A one-man rebellion, equal parts suicidal, homicidal, and populist, directed, in this case, not against the so-called "low" lifes Travis Bickle couldn't bring himself to have any sort of empathy with, but, first and foremost, against people in society who simply look down and spit upon the lives of others who they believe to be beneath them.
As Zazie Beetz's character would say (and I'm paraphrasing): were it any other movie, any other franchise other than Batman, Joker would indeed be a kind of hero. The quintessential folk hero: the bank robber, the escaped convict, the knight in shining armor, but more than that: Robin Hood.
By contrast to this anti-elitist social reject (who, very unlike Travis, does not use racist, immunitary, or criminoloical rhetoric as justification for his actions), Iron Man and Batman come off exactly as what they are: namely, billionaire playboys who justify their own use of "police" violence through the very existence of people (or, in Iron Man's case, "aliens") they claim to be dangerous. Joker, quite explicitly to the contrary of Christopher Nolan's take on the Batman mythos, is a film that asks, in a sense, for empathy to cut both ways. We can neither overlook that very real sense of empathy we may come to feel for Batman or iron Man's purported "villains" (re: victims), nor exonerate the members of their own aloof and privileged entourage for their complicity in perpetuating the very violence they claim to be enemies of.
It can be said that the true "toxic" masculinty of the film belongs, in this sense, not exclusively to the empathetic protagonist, but to the movie's surprise antagonist: Thomas Wayne, Batman's lionized billionaire father, whom in the comic books, as we know, would become the origin of Batman's "motivation" as a vigilante. In contrast to the unjustly murdered philanthropic billionaire of the Nolan films (a rich man ultimately trying to do "his best" for Gotham's underprivileged citizenry), here is a man who (it is suggested) either raped or otherwise impregnated and wantonly abandoned a servant in his employ, clearly in need of money for child care, who was instead pressured into silence and into renouncing any and all claim to having knowledge of the child's true parentage. A responsibility that the Wayne entourage, of course, blatantly denies, but that in the age of Epsteins and Trumps, perhaps should not seem so far-fetched.
Joker effectively takes the pseudo-dickensian demophobia of the Nolan films (for whom the very existence of "the Joker", qua terrorist, seemed to be ground enough to justify the declaration of an authoritarian state of exception), and flips it on its head. And this alone to me makes up for the movie's at times rather trite and cliché'd pathetic soliloquies in defense of the "little guy".
If nothing else, Joker attempts to rescue populism from its Trumpist appropriation and equally sociopathic derivations.
At times a bit too heavy-handed and moralistic for its own good, at times too safe in its pathetic appeals for "reform" and "increased funding" for mental health care in an age of enduring care-sector privatization (a political conceit which, however laudable, ends up subverting much of the film's earlier and, to my mind, far more poignant and militant commentary on the shortcomings of trying to psycho-patholize violence), Joker's more enduring message of alarm should ring true enough.
Joaquín Phoenix's Joker may very explicitly state, in the film, that his motivations are anything but political, and yet, if the film does nothing else, it makes us ask if he is truly as alone as society has made him and as he himself would like to claim. A single sad man enacting his own personal violent vendettas does not a radical antiauthoritarian movement make: and yet we could ask, as one of the posters carried by a protester in the film seems to insinuate, if we weren't, each of us, "clowns" in our own right. Ask ourselves a rather disturbing but perhaps also enlightening question: could there not be little bit of the best (and also worst) of The Joker in all of us?
All I would say is this: if there is a little bit of the anarchist antiauthoritarian "tramp" in you, perhaps he is worth cracking a smile for. If there is, on the contrary, also a bit of the sad violent fascist "trump" in you, then perhaps you'd do well to try to remove it, as best you can.