Masterpiece for the masses.

Rating: 5/10 (28 October 2019)

I had an ambivalent emotions after watching this movie. As everyone says Joaquin Phoenix performance is no less than brilliant and deserves every bit of praise it gets. But along with that there is incoherent and somewhat unrealistic story in the background. Just so you won't be mistaken everything in this movie is a background for the Phoenix's performance.
Arthur, the main character is depicted as an institutionalized mentally ill person with very poor social skills. Arthur's starved and deformed body shown time after time in close ups. Practically in every second scene in the movie we see Phoenix topless or in his boxers. The other repetitive motives are his uncontrolled laugh and his role dances. We see quite a lot of these and it's not that they are bad, not at all there is just too many of them. Creators of this film obviously decided to capitalize on the one good thing they had which is their main actor brilliant performance instead of unwind a full spectrum of Arthur's character. It's just like if taxi driver was posing in front of the mirror and having the 'Are you talking to me' scene ten times in the movie with different variations.
Arthur lives in a vacuum, which I guess people with his background actually do to some degree but he has some people in his life, his coworkers, his mother the neighbor and all these relations are blatant and don't contributing much to story as a whole. And the most redundant and unrealistic plot part in the movie was the neighbor one. I'm still wondering what was the reason for adding it as it haven't contributed anything meaningful to the story except of adding some artificial melodramatic side to it. In what world would strong, beautiful young woman get involved with someone like Arthur?
'Bad' things happen to Arthur in an unprecedented manner: he gets beaten, fired, cut off of his medical assistance and discovers unsettling truth about his past. One can't go wrong about these events combined with an overall atmosphere of despair, which was mentioned by some characters but doesn't really seen in the movie could cause anyone to lose it. I would expect a more subtle unfolding of the events in a psychological drama but mustn't we forget it's a mastermind villain in a buildup and nothing can be subtle here.
Next Arthur gets a gun from his coworker (please raise your hand if you ever not only were offered a gun but it was for free and from somebody you don't even know well) to protect himself from ... the twelve years old kids who have beaten him - Gotham must be a very tough place. This leads to the subway killing of a bunch of a rich jerks and as a result to mass uproar against the establishment with a culmination coming as a shooting of a talk show host during a live broadcast. Now if it was a drama Arthur would probably kill himself after shooting the host just like he planned since his whole world, fragile in the first place has been ruined. But we must not forget that this is a comics book movie and after rioters overturn the police car he has been taken on after the shooting we supposedly observe a born of a Joker.
I guess we will have to wait for Joker 2 to see how a mentally ill and challenged Arthur who barely manage his daily tasks becomes the mastermind we familiar with that terrifies Gotham. I left the theater with the impression it just not the Joker from Batman franchise we know - he just can't become that.