Darkest and grittiest film of the year

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2019)

From the director of "The Hangover" trilogy comes a dark and gritty version of Joker's origin story. His version of the Joker seems to be heavily inspired by Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy" with a touch of "Taxi Driver". On top of that, there are some attempts of commentary about society and how crooked it is. When you mix all those things up, you get a film that's going to divide everyone's opinions.
Let's begin with the good stuff first. Easily, the best part of the film was a performance by Joaquin Phoenix. He carried this film completely and he gave one of the better performances of his career (nothing is going to beat his performance in "The Master"). He proved once again why he's one of the best actors working today. If someone else was in his place, there's no way this film would've worked. His mannerisms, facial expressions (especially how he showed so many different emotions through laughs and eye expressions at the same time), his physicality and his vulnerability were incredible. If this film received a bit better reviews he would definitely be the main contender for that Oscar. Furthermore, the next aspect with which I was blown away was the score. I would even say that the score was a more effective way of showing emotions than the script. Because of the score at every moment, you knew how you were supposed to feel regarding what's happening on the screen, and that was achieved in a way that wasn't forceful. If you listen carefully to the score, you can even distinguish what scenes happened in reality and which were just in his imagination. Those two aspects of the film were outstanding and they carried the film noticeably. The color palette really nicely supported the script. Through the colors in the film, you could've seen in what mood the main character was and how he felt about what was happening around him. Colors helped to immerse the audience into that time period (I would say the film happened in 1981 because the movie theatre was showing the film "Blow Out" which came out in that year), but that wouldn't work without production design which was on the point.
The cinematography was decent. Although the director's vision wasn't groundbreaking I generally enjoyed most of the camera choices.
Let's get into some aspects that weren't so good. The script. It's one of the weakest parts of the film. You get a feeling the film wanted to say a lot, but unfortunately, it ended up saying almost nothing. There were a lot of attempts to give some social commentary, but for me personally, that fell flat because there wasn't any explanation of why is everything how it is. Joker as a character for the huge part of the film was complaining about how society is bad and how everyone is mean, but there wasn't any reason given why is the world like that, beyond poverty and poor people suck and rich people are corrupted and evil. Regarding that specific aspect, I felt like the director wanted to say a lot, but it just ended up being shallow and on the nose. The film was beating you over the head of how everything is bad. I would've appreciated concluding by myself that the world is crooked, but instead, I was just told what the situation was, without any room for my own interpretations. And that explained situation wasn't backed up with any other pieces of information. This time, tell don't show approach didn't work out. Furthermore, speaking of the script, all characters except Joker were unbelievable and underwritten. Zazie Beetz was completely unutilized and the relationship between her character and the Joker was underdeveloped. The film was supposed to make you believe in their relationship, but it didn't and because of it the film suffered at the later stages of its runtime. I understood what did film tried to achieve with their relationship, but that wasn't realized very well. That sentence could've been used for many aspects of this film. Robert De Niro as an older version of Rupert Pupkin had a ton of fun in this film, one of the better De Niro's performances since "Casino". They could've done more with his character, but at least it seemed like he had fun with this project. So, Joker is basically the only character that was decently written, but the thing is, the director didn't make a clear choice if we were supposed to feel for him or we were supposed to hate him because of his actions. Don't get me wrong, he isn't a good person, but the film way too many times tried to make the audience sympathize with him. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but at the times it felt way too forceful.
In the end, looking at the whole picture, this is a good film but isn't anything spectacular. At the same time, I would say the film was overblown with praises of how good it was, and yet at the same time, it was unfairly criticized because of some aspects in the film (e.g. the usage of violence).