As grotesque as a clown's smile

Rating: 1/10 (18 November 2019)

My husband and I went to see this film and found it extremely depressing. Moreover, everything is caricatured. What could be more normal, you might say, given that it was a depicting the life of a comic book clown?
Christopher Nolan, the director of the famous Batman trilogy, said before it was produced that this movie would be useless. Simply because when it comes to horror, the less you show, the scarier it is. If you're told that there is a giant monster in the woods and it eats people, you'll laugh and not believe it or you'll imagine the most horrible monster there is; the most horrible according to you! What others show us is never as horrible for us as what we imagine.
Here, to make things really awful, we sink into the worst possible melodrama. As if psychopaths had all been mistreated during their childhood, mocked in adolescence, misunderstood in adulthood without ever having anyone to help them effectively! But no, the vast majority of them were born with a missing bolt in their heads. Something was wrong in them from the start.
Here, the director wanted to make us cry by portraying roughly the most cartoonish misery. Everything is in bold capital letters, underlined and highlighted to be sure that we fully understood that the main character didn't have an easy life and that our society is so rotten that we should all revolt and suicide out of desperation or kill each other to put an end to it all. "Why so serious ? "asked the Ledger Joker. And that's a good question, because I'm worried about the future of this character, especially for the actors who will want to play him.
In terms of the actor's performance, that's Joaquim Phoenix pushed to the extreme all over. In all his films I remember, this actor plays social misfits, loners unable to make friends, depressive people or on the verge of a nervous breakdown, misunderstood guys, sons rejected by their fathers, rebels, etc. In short, he only plays tortured souls. He even played a guy who falls in love with his computer because he can't get along with a real girlfriend. So it's normal that he knows how to play a crazy clown. Talent? If you will, considering the fact that he seems unable to play much else.
This simplistic and gloomy depiction of society has already claimed victims. There are people who dress up as clowns and ransack everything in the streets and cinemas where the film is shown. It seems that some misfits wanted to believe that, as with the Joker, their misfortune depended on everything and everyone else. Their happiness couldn't certainly be up to themselves.
Anyway, don't believe the good things that are said about this movie. And if you feel a bit out of sorts, don't go to see it, you'll make yourself more unhappy for a film that's really not worth it.