Actual cinema for a change. Compelling film with a compelling performance by Phoenix

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2019)

This film looks likes and is ...cinema. I really didn't think they that any more. it's probably due to the setting in a grim but intensely real Gotham City, which has never been more like a truly unattractive new york (without the landmarks of course).
Joachim Phoenix is understated but mesmerising. Fundamentally vulnerable for much of the movie, his becoming is slow but inexorable. He won't be become quite the Joker you're used to, but be assured he will become the Joker, one with a great deal more depth than we've had before.
In a sense that's part of why the film's met with some mixed critical responses. Some of the critical voices have been quite vocal in condemning not the film so much as the 'wrong message' they feel it conveys. While the film certainly doesn't glamorise the violence in the Joker, since it explains it from the inside, it does make us sympathise fundamentally with the character, a rare feat given that he is portrayed as an abused, socially awkward, mentally ill loner, the kind who society mainly hears about when like in the Joker they decide to do something to be remembered by. The fear being articulated in other words is that the film with it's portrayal of a cathartic explosion of violence by the socially rejected will inspired others to follow.
People sometimes are inspired by films to act out, in good ways and bad, but fears like that seem misplaced & betray one of the worst aspects of modern movie-making, namely, that much of it seems to involve very conscious efforts at social control. Angry loners have been doing angry loner things for a long time and an actual study into why human explosions do happen, the discovery of what it's like to be on the other side of the glass so to speak, probably isn't going to make things much better or worse, except insofar as understanding people and what makes them tick, what makes them angry or sad etc is generally something which makes the world better rather than worse.
Moreover the issues also touches on one of the reasons the movie works: because so much of our entertainment & media is made with a conscious awareness of what kind of effect it's supposed to have, what sort of message we, in other words, are supposed to get, we are increasingly left with what often feels like synthetic experiences, involving synthetic feelings, where we are supposed to feel angry or happy, agree or disagree etc on cue. The Joker avoids this kind of socially responsible paint by numbers cinema and for that reason, almost bizarrely given that it's a Batman origin movie within a comic book superhero genre, it feels real, fundamentally authentic.
Whether the film makes the world a better or worse place remains to be seen, but ultimately, movies are only supposed to make the world a better place because they are works of art or vision or something approaching that. Having said that many great works of cinema really have been politically or socially subversive & there probably is something of that in this film too. Not only do we have a controversial hero/anti-hero but we also have his identification with the little guy (literally in one scene) within the context of the depiction of social anger & mass uprising against the rich, that more than a little seems to evoke the barely covered by the news mass protests in france for instance, not to mention populist feeling articulated against out of touch 'elites' within the wider international political system.
The depiction in places of quasi-revolutionary violence, which in the context of the Batman universe, we have always previously been led to believe was a case of simple thuggery & criminality, does a great deal to turn our perception of things upside down. In this sense the film really is a departure from what we are familiar with. With the humanization of the Joker comes by implication something like a destabilization of the essential goodness of his opponents, if not Batman himself - who as yet doesn't quite exist - then of the plutocrat class Batman represents, which here is ingeniously symbolized by the somewhat ambivalent, but certainly not sympathetic figure of Bruce Wayne's old man.
In many ways this sets up potential for good things to come. We already know Bruce Wayne's anger and now we have discovered the source of the Joker's too. Whether Phoenix's Joker will ever meet an adult batman remains to be seen. It probably won't happen, but it would certainly be something to behold