Review #9,529

Rating: 9/10 (25 February 2020)

I don't watch many superhero movies. "Batman & Robin" is my favourite Batman movie, because it seems to be the only one that acknowledges how childish and ludicrous the whole premise and all these ridiculous characters are, and has fun with it by having a sense of humour about its own stupidity.
I think that probably illustrates how much serious thought I've put into the deeper "meaning" or "themes" behind this franchise.
I thought "The Dark Knight" was well done, but after seeing "Joker", now I think I hate it. Because Joker is a movie I actually have continued to think about, maybe more than any other movie of 2019.
The Joker in The Dark Knight was written as a psychopath who "just wants to see the world burn", and who blows up hospitals and passenger ferries for no reason. He commits arbitrarily contrived terrorist acts apparently for the sake of making Batman's brand of vigilante justice seem unquestionably heroic. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire advanced-weapons-enthusiast who considers himself above the law, but in the morally unambiguous world of The Dark Knight, that's a good thing, because Batman is the hero, and he stops the Joker, who is obviously the bad guy.
It's suddenly dawning on me that most superhero movies basically reflect the worldview of your average NRA member.
The Joker in "Joker" is a far more sympathetic character, a mentally ill man made victim of an uncaring society that doesn't have adequate measures in place to help people like him. Those who don the plastic clown masks are not mindless thugs for the hero to leave strung up to a lamp post, but rather they're the working class, protesting rampant social injustice and inequality.
The way these extras are depicted as anonymous criminals in previous Batman movies, and suddenly humanized in this movie reminds me of the facile way that corporate media characterizes protest movements around the world with different vocabulary, according to patent ideological biases. Hong Kong demonstrators against communist China are part of a "pro-democracy movement" and above media criticism even when they're hurling molotov cocktails. Those in Chile protesting a US-sponsored fascist government with a 10% approval rating are automatically "violent rioters".
What is so impressive about the way "Joker" was written, and what makes the movie so unsettling, is that it IS morally ambiguous. The Joker, and the movement he inspires, do very bad things. They become the violent rioters. But they are also pro-democracy protesters, the 99%, and I sympathize with them more than I do the Waynes - the billionaire mayor who doesn't give a s**t about these people.
The movie is a cautionary tale, I think, about the use of violence to achieve political ends: if we're going to have revolution, it needs to be non-violent, or else we're walking a dark path. But perhaps more crucially, the movie is a cautionary tale about capitalism: a system of incredible wealth inequality, with a massively underserved underclass, is eventually going to blow up, and maybe violence is inevitable. So we'd better change the system.
I'm so sick of comic book movies, I wasn't really expecting very much from Joker. It's very well done, and Joaquin Phoenix gives an incredible performance. But what's most surprising to me is that I'm still thinking about it, chewing on some of its themes, now weeks after watching it. I guess that's the mark of a great movie.