Sad people's comedy

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2020)

A frustrated but relatively harmless guy gets pushed over a little too much and goes on a sick rampage. This is a story I've seen several times, the first one I remember being Falling Down, that 1993 movie with Michael Douglas. There were definitely some more, I just can't recall them, because the plot of such films always goes through the same steps, you just can't tell the stories apart.
I've heard so much praise for Joker, I expected something groundbreaking. Instead what we have here is one stellar individual performance in front of an otherwise dull and intentionally grisly landscape. An unsettled city full of unsolved social issues, cynical politicians saying things as if to fire up the situation on purpose. Violent kids on the street, white-collar jerks, everything around created specifically to depress the viewer.
Sometimes it does feel as if DC simply doesn't want its fans to have a single bright thought or a light emotion. It's a universe full of sad and uptight characters delivering to an army of equally sad people. At least before it was about one emotionally scarred individual putting on a mask and putting on a tour de force against the "bad guys". It was dark, but the action tried to make up for it. This time, however, there's almost no action - and you are just taken on a journey of the main character to join him in wallowing in all his personal darkness and drama.
Joaquin Phoenix is no doubt exceptional here, his performance is worth all the accolade it received. Besides that, though, Joker is simply too one-dimensional to be touching. When you paint everything black too many times, all the next layers of paint just don't make any difference, and even a clown's garish garb can't bring in enough color to make up for it. Joker is a beautifully messed up character, but he's nowhere close to Tonya Harding, another fantastic performance that was not given half the credit it deserves. Joker's craziness is predefined by his grotesquely gloomy surroundings, while Tonya's fate was a real life story of this very world. Makes one guess whether we can really sympathize with issues we classify as our own.
Despite a truly fiery (in all senses) ending, Joker the movie fails to ignite a spark of prolonged interest. If not for the crazy praise this film has received, one might not even feel pressed to share their thoughts on this film with others, turning the watch into a cinematographic one-night stand. Tomorrow, I will probably not be ashamed of what I did tonight. But is this experience simply forgettable without a hint of a lasting trace? Totally so. If people will be thinking about 2019, Baby Yoda is what they'll probably recall first, and that speaks volumes about this film's quality.