Dark Comedy

Rating: 7/10 (14 November 2019)

The film Joker seems to be a black comedy; it's slick, sick and stylish sense of humour drawing on the "all you can do is laugh at life" vein of thought, or should I say mood...
In my opinion, the film does this well!
Strongly influenced by many Hollywood classics of the 70's and 80's and rampant with a sense of it's individuality within a plethora of comic book material cinema adaptations.
I thought that the lead performance eclipsed any other facet of the film and made for a lead character who could involve my attention all the way.
There are lovely moments which perhaps hark to a slightly more recent American film making period, of 'Momentum', 'American Beauty', 'Eternal Sunshine....' and 'Requiem for a Dream' as well as the obvious references to the cinema of New Hollywood.
I personally enjoyed the introduction of young kid Bruce Wayne once, at the gates to Wayne mansion, especially in the heightened context of a possible brotherly relationship that was slipping through the film at that juncture. I did not appreciate his reintroduction later in the film and certainly not when I realised that Batmans uber origin story was actually to be visualised AGAIN within this film.
I also felt that there was perhaps more line to be played out about the conflict of realities that was represented by the possibility of his mother being right about his parentage and driven mad by the total denial of her truth or if she was indeed mad all along and culporable of negligent abuse....in essence was the Joker mad by this abuse or by inheritance and the one truth his "mother" had spoken was of his actual parentage and his illegitimate "Wayne status". In the film it appeared that this tension was not played as far as it could have been....or was going to be in previous scripts.
The musical score was sometimes distracting for me, and overloaded a scene or sequence in the film rather than heightening the effect of images and sound effect.
However, I was readily, easily and effectively carried along by 'Joker' as it unfolded it's one-character story and I think that the film is worthy of plenty of praise for it's pursuit of such strong storytelling.
The transformation of Jokers dancing routines alone, as he morphs through the stages if his changing existence, tells you how tightly the writing, acting and directing of this one character story focuses it's aim.
A 7/10 rating from me for this juicy straight-telling darkly black comedy!