Difficult, Challenging, Unfriendly Truths About Life in Our Modern Society

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2020)

Uncomfortable close-ups with a broken man, struggling to cope in a broken city, without a flicker of hope from a broken society. Set in the very early 1980s, Joker goes out of its way to invoke all the dirt and grime of that era. The local news, the regional politics, the dark sense of a brooding civil discontent, it's all here, and not only are we transported back to an age that could've easily spawned such a fractured criminal figurehead, we're shown direct parallels in today's seemingly polished outward-facing veneer.
Joaquin Phoenix is mesmerizing in that lead role, carrying the picture in an essential performance that alternately wows and disturbs. He wrings every last drop of power out of a difficult part, creating a beautiful sense of poetic, unsettling discord that's tough to watch but even tougher to tear one's eyes from. Even if we can't endorse his actions (the film also stops short of doing so), we can understand the series of tragic missteps that led up to them, and maybe identify a shard of that same mania tucked away in our own subconscious.
It's both literal and metaphorical, concrete but ethereal. We never know if what we're seeing takes place in reality or in a hyper-realistic, drug-induced sense of imagination, as the two are so hopelessly, constantly intertwined. There's a logical explanation for almost every last one of the character's trademark quirks, most of the heartbreaking variety (particularly that violent, wrenching laugh), but are those the truth or more figments? Daring and ugly and spontaneously violent (the deaths in this film are shocking in their immediate finality), it's the kind of movie that stomps your teeth into the concrete and leaves you wondering where it all went wrong. The post-climax is a weakness, perhaps, its messaging too blunt and transparent, but that's a rather small gripe. I've been thinking about it all weekend.