Superficial and often tedious but what a performance!

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2020)

In the non-canonical origin story Joker, Joaquin Phoenix plays a deeply disturbed man named Arthur Fleck as he experiences through a series of traumas that turn him into the notorious supervillain.
Phoenix is terrific as the agonized loser with a compulsive-laughter condition. He's weird and creepy and full of angst and anger and self-loathing and everyone-else-loathing.
The first half hour is simply a grinding, agonizingly slow moving portrayal of Arthur's life. Then there's a moment of stunning, electrifying violence. And then everything gets tedious again.
Joker is not a supervillain movie, it's an artsy character study, and if you like those then this might appeal to you. But there's a superficiality to it all. Arthur is deeply disturbed and living in a city where society's have-nots are increasingly disenfranchised, but the script and director don't really seem to have anything to say about mental illness or inequality and injustice.
In the run-up to the film, director Todd Phillips criticized "woke" culture and the far left, and perhaps that's part of the problem. Woke culture says we need to think about things deeply, and Phillips really, really seem loathe to delve into what it means to be mentally unstable and poor in the greater societal sense. He's only concerned with how it effects Arthur. Arthur is also only concerned with how it effects Arthur, and the result is a film that seems to accept that Arthur is a victim of an unjust society while never really considering why the society is unjust or how much of Arthur's problems might be the result of his own narcissistic self pity.
But the main problem with the movie is it's slow-moving and dull far more often than not. I wouldn't recommend it.