Joker begins. Why so serious? [Score: 50%]

Rating: 5/10 (13 November 2019)

Perhaps you should be careful what you wish for, as my review for "The Dark Knight" had the headline "Too much of The Joker is barely enough!" and I wrote near the end of my review, here, of Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker: "You enjoy his philosophy on life and you want to hear more of it...from a safe distance! It's rare to see such a worthy adversary for a hero...complex and with an onion skin. I kept wanting to see and hear more of Ledger's Joker. Ledger's death robs us of the possibility of an encore performance. This movie and role is as good as "Two hands" for Ledger (an Australian movie)".
Anyway, here it is, although I can't say that I was dead keen to see someone else in the role of Joker (Joaquin Phoenix, in this case). This film does seem to be critically hyped, with even talk of Oscar nominations, if not wins. Personally, it doesn't strike me as being a particularly good film...it would have to be a very weak award field for this to win anything, I think. Perhaps an award for cinematography? I dunno.
The film "Joker" provides a backstory to the creation of the supervillain Joker, from his origin as the depressing sad case Arthur Fleck. It is a dour film, seemingly aiming to be "serious", so as to be eligible for Academy Award nomination consideration (Heath Ledger deservedly won an Oscar for his acting performance in "The Dark Knight"). Not being a superfan of comics (well, not for a long time, at least, and not for Batman comics), I have no idea how the Joker's backstory in "Joker" gels with any 'canonical' portrayal in comics or cartoons. I'm just struck wondering whether the backstory needed to be the one given to us. Couldn't it have been something else? Something better? "Joker" is so dour that I can't really imagine anyone wanting to watch it again, 'for pleasure', as I could imagine myself doing for "The Dark Knight", purely because of the character of The Joker and Heath Ledger's compelling portrayal of him.
That being said, if having a backstory for Joker is of interest to you and you wonder how that ties in with the first in the recent Batman trilogy ("Batman begins"), this will no doubt be mandatory viewing for you. For me, I just wondered whether the intersection of "Joker" and "Batman begins" was too pat, too unnecessarily intertwined. Again, I have no idea whether this intersection is merely canonical or just too cute by half.
Watching Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck (surely his entire name is deliberately apt, if you imagine a Cockney saying it?), many times, especially early on, he struck me as being mannered, stylised, with his twitching, occasionally effete manner and slumping around. In other words, he looked like he was acting. His appearance and physicality reminded me, at times, of Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. De Niro has a significant role in this film as a nightly talk show host. There is an odd movement that Arhtur/Joker makes which made me scratch my head, figuratively speaking...is he doing Tai Chi? It looks something like that but perhaps it's a weird dance? Or both, depending on the moment? I dunno.
Fleck is troubled, of course. He has 'problems'. At times I found myself wondering just how deep they went, though. For instance, it wasn't clear to me what was in his mind when he was looking rather too intently at a neighbour's daughter...on more than one occasion.
The editing is dreamlike at times, lulling you into missing the slide from the reality of the world of the film to that of Fleck's mind. The editing can then make you aware of what's occurred but sometimes I'm not sure whether what I've just seen actually happened or not, e.g. when Arthur receives visitors at his flat.
There are moments or things in the film which strike me as being unbelievable or implausible. The main one is that the world of this film is too like our own for it be plausible to me that someone like Arthur/Joker could actually become a supervillain...I'd have to assume that the police must be incompetent for that to transpire. On a more personal level in the film, I found that a relationship that Arthur formed to also be unbelievable but there is a resolution to that scenario which I found satisfactory.
Early on and throughout the film you do get a sense of Gotham being a city divided by class, from the early newscast (which I unfortunately didn't pay a lot of attention to) to the flat where Arthur lives. That being said, this representation of an underclass didn't hit me with nearly the amount of force that I was hit with when I saw how Cliff Booth was living, in the recent Quentin Tarantino film "Once upon a time in Hollywood". The class divide in "Joker" serves mainly to serve as a prop, in any case.
Overall, "Joker" hasn't captured the magic that Heath Ledger brought to the character in "The Dark Knight", where I had my first stirrings that the character of Batman was boring and I just wanted the entire film to be about Ledger's Joker. These Jokers are poles apart. Ledger's was engaging and entertaining, whereas this film is neither of those two things. "Joker" comes across as a cringe comedy...without the comedy (Fleck's first appearance on the talk show really did make me cringe...I just wanted the scene to stop!) or a mock-anti-epic...without the mockery. I did get one laugh during the movie (maybe two at the most, but I can't remember the other incident), i.e. an incident with a sliding door. In essence, this film is saying: "This is serious!". For this reason, I have to say that the film is not only not particularly engaging, worse, it's not entertaining to boot. Personally, watching this film again some time in the future holds no attraction for me.
Miscellaneous:
* The occasional violence in this film strikes me as being nastier than what I recall being in the last Batman trilogy, especially the murder of one man.
* Odd POV moment with the camera when Arthur dives into the fridge.
* Anachronistic: why was the audience in the film laughing so hard at an old Charlie Chaplin film? Canonical reference?
* Train shootings: I didn't feel that the sleazes 'deserved' what happened to them.
* Canonical that Joker's real identity known very early on?
* I've reconsidered my score a few times: 60% to 55+% to 50%