The Academy finally gets one right

Rating: 10/10 (11 February 2020)

For a decade, I felt like the Oscars continued to overlook the truly greatest performances and films. I'm still salty that The Social Network didn't take home the Best Picture Oscar early in the decade and that neither The Conjuring (best film of 2013) nor Gone Girl (best film of 2014) barely got any, if any, major award recognition. Those movies are true masterworks, yet the Academy continues to award sentimental, forgettable drivel that no one will be re-visiting years from now. It took the entire decade of the 2010s for me to feel like the Academy got one right and they picked a good one to do it!
JOKER (2019) may have gotten negative critical reviews, but thankfully, the movie-going voices were heard and the Academy seemed to go with people who pay to enjoy movies instead of the ones paid to critique them. This movie, no question in my mind, is easily one of the best films of the decade and may very well BE the best. And it came at just the right time, sneaking in at the very end. I promise, this film will hold up! People will be breaking it down and analyzing every inch and every frame for years and years to come. Who could have ever believed that when this century started, that 20 years later, one but TWO actors would take home the ultimate prize for essaying the most scrutinized and popular character in all of media history.
Make no mistake, while I do truly think that Joker is a masterpiece, it stands tall on the shoulders of one of the most remarkable performances in film history, delivered by recent Best Actor Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix. Had Phoenix not taken home the grand prize, I would have conformed to the masses and threatened to riot! lol Phoenix was so spectacular, I'm re-evaluating whether or not Heath Ledger's Oscar back in 2008 was truly warranted, and Ledger wasn't even my favorite interpretation of Joker up to this point as I was way more entertained by Jack Nicholson in 1989's Batman and Cameron Monaghan in the late 2010s TV series Gotham. But Phoenix may be regarded as the culmination of all these fascinating interpretations.
Set circa 1983 in Gotham City, Joker spins the tale of Arthur Fleck (Phoenix' character), a struggling comedian who works jobs as a clown around the metropolis. Arthur has a rare disorder which causes him to go into laughing fits at the most inappropriate times and that, along with having to take care of his physically and mentally incapacitated mother (superbly played by veteran Frances Conroy, who in my opinion deserved a Supporting Actress nomination), contributes to his severe shyness, lack of confidence, and social anxiety. To help him cope, every night Arthur watches a popular talk show hosted by Murray Franklin (brilliant performance by Robert DeNiro, who also deserved Oscar love as Supporting Actor). Arthur also gains a girlfriend during this story, his neighbor Sophie Drummond (well played by Zazie Beetz).
Director Todd Phillips borrows heavily from Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, as the star of those movies Robert DeNiro has an important part in this one, essentially essaying a version of the Jerry Lewis character from Kind of Comedy. Much like Travis Bickle, Arthur is extremely quiet and a ticking time bomb and much like Rupert Pupkin, Arthur fancies himself a comedian and dreams of being famous and much like both characters, Arthur achieves a form of infamy in Joker.
Joker is basically a 100% serious, psychological exercise, not the traditional lighthearted, by the numbers, comic book movie that's been flooding movie screens for the last 40 years. Make no mistake, I still admire entertaining comic book movies such as the Christopher Reeve Superman films, the Michael Keaton Batman films, Chris Nolan's Batman Begins, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, but there's an obvious uniform beat to all those movies. Most of the other comic book movies aren't even worth mentioning, but at least those I mentioned have a ton of entertainment value and re-watchability.
The aesthetic of Joker brilliantly captures the early 1980s without feeling like some parody or even homage to the decade. It's simply a unique tale set in a certain era and focuses on one of the most fascinating fictional characters in history. The movie didn't win Best Picture (as it should have), but at least the Academy rightfully acknowledges Phoenix's already legendary performance. When the popular phrase "the hype is real" was first spoken, whoever said it was definitely thinking of Joker.