Director Phillips' moral equivalence between criminality fueled by mental illness and a one-dimensional corrupt, fascistic society, proves specious

Rating: 4/10 (14 November 2019)

Director Todd Phillips' origin story stars Joaquin Phoenix in a dark, gritty fairy tale as to how the Joker of DC Comics fame, became the number one criminal of Gotham City. Phillips likens Gotham to a New York City of the very early 80s, replete with rampant crime, a garbage strike, rats, Joe Franklin-like TV shows, graffiti laden subway cars and VCRs.

The Joker's decompensation is shown in increments as he devolves into criminality and madness. The main strike against him is that he never moved out of his mother's apartment and takes care of his demented elderly mother, who has a long history of mental health issues. Eventually, in a scene where he's able to illegally extract an old report from the state mental hospital, he learns that his mother used to work for (now) mayoral candidate, Gotham's power broker Thomas Wayne (father of Bruce, who eventually became Batman). It appears that the mother developed the delusion that Wayne impregnated her and that the Joker is actually Wayne's illegitimate son.

The Joker ends up paying a visit to the Wayne mansion where he encounters little Bruce and chokes Alfred the Butler, after not being allowed in to see Thomas Wayne. Soon afterward, he's able to sneak into a concert hall where he punches the elder Wayne who's just finished relieving himself in the bathroom.

Phillips also fills in the backstory of the Joker's daily life in which he constantly finds himself laughing inappropriately in public (it's later brought out he sustained a brain injury after his mother's boyfriend smashed his head in against a radiator when he was a child). The Joker even has a card made up which he gives to strangers whenever he's subject to these laughing outbursts, explaining the origin of this peculiar neurological condition.

There's quite a bit more dark stuff we end up privy to--including how the Joker loses his Rent-a-Clown job after he drops a gun at a hospital where he's entertaining children (a co-worker had given him the gun after a bunch of punks assault him while he's working as a street performer) as well as how he murders three Wall Street types on a subway train after they taunt and beat him up.

The Joker also develops a thing for Sophie, the next door neighbor who has a young daughter. Phillips does well in showing how The Joker deludes himself into believing that he has developed some kind of romantic relationship with her. He even imagines Sophie visiting him and mother at the hospital, after she has a stroke.

For all the imagined scenarios, reality intrudes. There's a scene where Sophie confronts him and asks whether the Joker has been following her. And later he breaks into her apartment and when she comes home, the Joker asks her, "You're Sophie, right?" as if in reality, he hardly knew her. When he leaves the apartment, we're left wondering if he ended up murdering his neighbor but Phillips wisely keeps it a mystery.

All in all, Phillips is intent on portraying a man who is gradually losing his grip on reality and becoming more and more violent. The Joker even ends up suffocating his mother with a pillow, causing her death. But Phillips unfortunately wants it both ways: as much as how he adroitly depicts how the Joker became the master criminal he came to be, he also attempts to evoke sympathy for him by depicting society (both the community and government) besieged by a simplistic, fascistic mentality and morality.

Phillips draws a moral equivalence between the Joker's criminality (perhaps excused by so-called mental illness) and a society motivated by promoting the haves over the have-nots. The Joker is a perennial victim beginning with Thomas Wayne who not only has no toleration for lawlessness and will use any means necessary in cracking down on the disenfranchised but has no sympathy for the Joker (who's convinced that Thomas is his father).

There are no moderates in Phillips' comic book world. The Joker's therapy sessions must be discontinued due to government cuts (they obviously no longer have resources or patience for the disenfranchised). The Joker's co-worker (whom he eventually stabs to death) believes only in vigilante justice and gives him the gun with the proviso that he pay him back out of his salary.

The three upstanding Wall Street guys who end up beating the Joker up on the train, do so without mercy, and he responds by executing them. The Joker's life-long dream of becoming a standup comedian is fulfilled after he's invited on to the Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro) Show but this is only after the show's producers utilize earlier clips of the Joker performing at a comedy club, in order to mock him.

The Joker becomes a movement when he executes Murray Franklin on live TV and then is hailed as a hero by criminals who now regard him as some sort of savior. As much as Phillips may abhor the violence of those who advocate class warfare on the basis of income inequality, he also revels in the violence by harping on it and depicting the Joker as some kind of victim.

The denouement is also unsatisfying as Phillips suggests that after The Joker is locked up at the state mental hospital, this whole story might have been a figment of his imagination. That way I suppose Phillips can escape accusations of promoting a moral equivalency between criminality fueled by mental illness and an indifferent, one dimensional fascistic society.