Joker (2019)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hair, Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing    So this is the top nominee with eleven chances to take home an Oscar.  We'll see.

Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) is just trying to get by in the cold, unfeeling streets of Gotham City.  He loves his job as a clown but makes barely enough to support himself and his mother (Frances Conroy), a one-time employee of Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), while dreaming of becoming a stand-up comic like his idol, late night host Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro).  After a subway altercation turns violent, Arthur discovers a new outlet for his frustration that mirrors a city on the tipping point to anarchy.

I just...  What is the point?  This isn't a great origin story.  It's trying so hard to be Taxi Driver meets The Dark Knight that it loses any sense of its own identity.  Phoenix is working overtime to move out of the shadows cast by Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson but if there's one distinct difference, it's that he's... not funny.  And that's what really sucks about calling this a Joker movie.  He's not the Joker.  He's just some sad clown.  Cesar Romero leaned into the camp.  Jack Nicholson embraced the narcissistic chaos.  Heath Ledger was a broken bottle top giggle.  Even Jared Leto was unintentionally funny.

There is no humor in Joker at all.  And there are places where it could be!  Arthur reading his mom's letter and confronting Thomas Wayne could have been a hilarious comedy of errors.  Instead, it's just mean-spirited and ultimately pointless.  Having a mental illness is not funny.  There are people who are funny with mental illnesses.  Every stand-up comedian has depression or anxiety or worse.  But just having schizophrenia isn't a punch-line.

I read some think piece about how the point was that Arthur wanted to be just like his idol but became disillusioned after seeing how Murray punched down at less fortunate individuals from his ivory tower.  Maybe.  There's really only one instance of that and that's when he invites Arthur on his show.  Otherwise, Murray is just an old man in the same comfortable groove he's been in most of his career.

Overall, I found this movie disappointing in a way I can't really describe.  It was like a mash-up of other, better films microwaved into blandness with violence standing in for intelligence.  Really, the only funny thing I've even heard about this movie is that the song playing for the stairs dance ("Rock and Roll part 2" by Gary Glitter, a convicted pedophile) is specifically written into the script.  That's some cringe right there.