Beautiful but one-dimensional

Rating: 6/10 (20 November 2019)

I was anticipating perhaps too much having read some reviews first. Sadly, The Joker has left me feeling flat, emotionally. It's very good, romps along at a fair pace, ravishingly bleak to look at but the characters seemed one-dimensional. The Joker/Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) starts off as already being more than half-way to serial killer. There's very little sublety to his character. There are a few attempts to show the real person underneath his illness but it needed much more. There are hardly any lighter moments to counterpoint the overall despair. We get it, people can be nasty, but I felt I was being bashed over the head at times. Phoenix is excellent, as is De Niro as the appalling Murray Franklin but again, he is a flatly written character with no redeeming features. Even the violent scenes left me unmoved, they were signalled so far in advance there was no shock value and I felt little empathy for the victims. There is a really good story somewhere in here. This wasn't it.