JOKER IS NOT A COMIC BOOK

Rating: 8/10 (28 December 2019)

Joker is not a movie about comics, like the ones we get used to in the Marvel Universe. Although released to tell the story of the origin of the arch-enemy of Batman, what you see here is a big, dark, and dramatic story about mental illness.
At the beginning of the movie, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) laughs at his visit to the social worker (where he gets his medication). Arthur's laugh most resembles a painful and uncontrollable bout of crying. Going out into the street, he finds a filthy backdrop of a Gotham City paralyzed by a garbagemen strike. Some recognize a resemblance to Scorcese's Taxi Driver's New York.
Not coincidentally, another essential character is the humorist and host Murray Franklin, lived by Robert de Niro. He is the opposite of that character he lived in another Scorcese movie - The King of Comedy. In Joker, De Niro is the boisterous host who is admired and imitated by Arthur, who spends the nights in the company of his ailing mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), watching the show and fantasizing about participation.
Arthur works as a professional clown, animating birthday parties, and singing to sick children in hospitals. From reserved habits and oblivious to social contacts, he ends up being a victim of bullies, beaten on the street, ignored in his performances, and ridiculed by Murray in a video of a stand-up performance.
A co-worker gives Arthur a weapon for self-protection, and access to this artifact seems to be the way through which a tormented and divided mind could find a way to express itself. He twists his bony torso in front of the TV with his .38 in hands. By then he is no longer Fleck: an evil entity inhabits him, in an almost imperceptible transition.
When things start to get out of hand, Arthur is invited to the Murray show and asks to be called the Joker, name of the card with a jester. That's an appropriate archetype for a victim of society and influential politicians, like Thomas Wayne (future Batman's father), who calls activists "clowns."