Overrated and badly directed film with a misleading title

Rating: 3/10 (11 October 2019)

Joker is basically the lite edition or postmodern version of Fight Club or the Scorsese films it lifts from. It's interesting to see how easily words like masterpiece and groundbreaking are being used for this, and that is the one joke that this movie successfully pulls off. It's just a whole lot of self-seriousness and posturing and is essentially hollow. It pretends to say a lot but ends up saying very little or nothing at all, not about the character nor about the society he's part of.
It is also 'Joker' only in name and has very little to do with the super-villain. I'm all for a different interpretation and even an origin story for the joker but this movie fails to recognise or capture his spirit. Even 'Proto-Joker' doesn't quite do it justice, and I can think of a dozen more suitable titles e.g. Arthur, The Untalented Mr. Fleck, Smoker, Poser etc. Infact he's more akin to a less dangerous but also mentally unstable villain like Ratcatcher or Calendar Man though just with a clown theme, and is not even close to embodying the joker's extreme form of nihilism. It's not that it has to be a comic-book accurate portrayal, that would be irrelevant if it was genuinely a good movie. But far from being a masterpiece , it doesn't quite manage even that. It fails not just as an inaccurate portrayal of the Joker's spirit or essence, but also as a film about a person going over the edge.
The weakest aspect of the movie for me is the poor to average direction. The movie lacks any of the subtlety and nuance that I was hoping for and what unfolds is not as much character development as it is things happening to Arthur. A good example of the poor writing and direction is the very Trump-like and one-dimensional Thomas Wayne character. This first became obvious during a scene in which some people happened to know the entire lyrics to a clown song. In a movie that otherwise tries very hard to be realistic that felt very unnecessary and took me out of the experience and it felt very contrived and predictable after that. It takes too many obvious liberties and plot conveniences to move the story forward in an unnatural and unrefined way, and ultimately felt like they tried to disguise the poor writing and direction with a dark and gritty atmosphere instead of those elements complementing each other.
The only reason to watch this movie is Phoenix's performance, which while not groundbreaking is good enough to earn an awards nomination or two. I wouldn't put it in the same league as Heath Ledger's portrayal but they were two very different roles and characters. Ledger made his joker seem effortless while one can really see the strain and work Phoenix puts in. To put it simply, Ledger made it seem natural and didn't look like he was acting while with Phoenix you really know that he is, even to the extent that it may seem like overacting at times. Perhaps owing to the more physical nature of this version of whoever this character is supposed to be, that's not necessarily a criticism.
Overall an average film at best that pretends to be a lot more. I don't see this one ageing well or being remembered decades later the way Fight Club or the Scorsese movies it's "inspired" by, or CBM's like Dark Knight or Logan or even Tim Burton's Batman, are remembered today.