the only true and worthy successor to Taxi Driver

Rating: Null/10 (23 January 2020)

The overt and relentless Homage to Taxi driver, King of Comedy, and Casting architecture of Cape Fear, far from being subliminal, are key references., almost required academic collations to a better comprehension of the layers in this movie of surprising depth. parallels to Travis Bickel are meant't to be considered...those shadows add a shimmer of horror to the evolution of Arthurs drama. the references are too numerous to mention in detail...from the fingers to head in a mock suicide to the delusional love relation with the Blackwoman...and on and on...and since many of these elements were used as common points in scorsese work...the complexity is deepened here...Soin fact this"prequel" serves also asa long awaited continuation...something attempted in "light Sleeper", also written by Paul Schrader. Deniro now becomes Murray...inverting his role as the stalker of Jerry Lewis in King....and after-shadowing the casting decisions of Cape Fear that brought back actors from the Robert Mitchum version and recasting them in related roles in the update...
And all this is just a broad stroke glance at structure. The powerful centerpiece...presented late...the assassination of Murray.....completes the brothel murders of taxi driver by adding a colder psychological profile...less generic...less social/moral...and more character specific......but requiring awareness of the stratum suggested as motive in the earlier movie. the impulses explained dramatically in Taxi....
The interaction between Murray and his "understudy"Phoenix...who has surpassed the master's bald dementia as the driver by miles...is fascinating and as good apiece of acting as anything i've ever seen. Deniro reacts with a chuckle of appreciation when Phoenix glares at him before his final line...he sees what he started decades earlier...now in the hands of another eminently worthy virtuoso...so the chuckle is more integrated real appreciative recognition of another great actor giving the nod to an equal... Those minutes from Joker's stage entrance to his final edited announcement to the media cameras are nucleic...the most inclusive DNA of the movie...it'sa ll packed in that cluster. His bizarre makeup...the grin getting broader and bloodier all the time...the real rage Phoenix animates under the makeup...are transforming...it is one of the craziest. angriest.disturbed faces to ever appear in a movie...One sees and can relate to a man,,,,not a mono-dimension comix rendition....present among but totally broken from the last ties to humanity....way past a turning back or closure with a vacuum instead of a moral construct....and who knows it and celebrates it....perhaps the finest portrait on film of utter isolation...wonderfully rendered in costume and posture and expression and insane calm...Agony fined tuned to a pitch that finally become bliss. i read long ago how the white-pain deliberately sought by extreme masochists can reach levels where agony becomes bliss...at the worst in-extemis situations the distinction finally vanishes.....a distinction explored again by Scorcese's collaborative fusion with Konzantzikos in the Last Temptation.......

In all this ....phoenix xis the relentless black-hole of the movie...whenyou pass the event horizon and get sucked into the performance...you don't get out again....what is this crazy f..k gonna do now?
the directorial/actor agreement to play Joker as a man traumatized to a final psychotic break...As his modern day abuse continues...and the revelations about his formative betrayal mounts...the evolution intot his surreality makes sense in away never explored in previous portraits that at best infer what is put under an electron microscope here. ....always maintaining an identifiable human core...is quite brilliant....their is, after 60years of watching movies...something truly unique that smacks of genius in a realm where the word is ludicrously overused and utter hype...not here....it's remarkable. reduces ledger and Nickelson and romero to one dimensional comic figurines......
Criticisms that his acting,his laugh is fake etc...are way off track..all this is deliberate and operate in a number of ways....usually to show the mirth as as a strangled form of despair...or used as a conscious theatrical choice to serve a momentary social diversion...if it sounds fake...it's supposed to......when called into the bosses office for a reprimand he cuts the laughter on a dime when he's out of earshot from the employee who betrayed him on the 38 issue.....
The movie has enough violence and fine editing and dramatic imagery to satisfy the larger % of the audience that has an "IQ" under 50, always lowered, as in mass sporting events or concerts...when verbal and neo-cortical function can entirely disappear....i refer you to Elias Canetti...Crowds and Power that finally got him a Nobel Prize at a time when they were handed out for something more then having melatonin as a non recessive gene....
But mainly the movie is too thoughtful and was essentially designed as a dramatic study...deployed with enough pizazz to keep imbeciles amused but not having any sense of critical derivatives that the director and Phoenix used as operating structural references...very very consciously.....playing to a 99% unconscious audience into bang bang bang......