Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga star in a Jukebox Cracked musical, but it doesn’t let Joker be Joker enough

In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’ musical sequel to “Joker” that tries to be dark and irreverent but is actually pretty gauche and earthy, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), the sad-sack incel who became a homespun, psychopathic version of the Joker, is about to go on trial for his crimes. In theory, this would seem to be a good thing, since Arthur doesn’t get out much. At Arkham State Hospital, he lives in a small, filthy cell that he leaves every morning so he can sneak down the hall with his bucket of urine and pour it into a sink. Arthur is now skin and bones, his face scrunched up in despair. The guards, led by the cheerful sadist Jackie (Brendan Gleeson), keep asking him, “Do you have a joke for us today?” But Arthur has no more jokes or smiles. He has returned to being a model of misery.

Of course, he’s famous now, too — so famous for killing late-night talk show host Murray Franklin on live television that they even made a TV movie about him. “Everyone still thinks you’re a star,” Jackie says. And she’s right. Everyone knows who Arthur is. Lots of people hate him, but at least one person in Arkham — an inmate named Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), with two-toned platinum hair and a look of disheveled desperation — adores him. She’s seen that TV movie countless times. When he walks into the room, her eyes light up. The rest of the world might think he’s crazy, but she looks at him and sees…the Joker.

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Arthur’s trial is sure to be a media event. It will be broadcast live on television, and in preparation for it, Arthur undergoes a jailhouse interview with Paddy Meyers (Steve Coogan), a tabloid television personality who taunts and mocks him. Arthur responds by singing, in a dry, cracked voice, “I’m wild again, beguiled again…” and begins to play “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” from the 1940 musical “Pal Joey.” If you’re surprised to hear him draw on such an old songbook, get used to it. Many of the songs Arthur sings in “Folie à Deux” (If My Friends Could See Me Now, That’s Entertainment!) sound like they came straight from your grandmother’s record collection.

The trial finally begins, and it all hinges on one key question. No one disputes that Arthur killed Murray Franklin and four others; even Arthur admits it. The only question is whether he will be declared insane, which would spare him the death penalty. His lawyer, played by the tough Catherine Keener, argues that Arthur didn’t actually commit the crimes, because he has a split personality, a disturbed alter ego, a hidden identity that takes over him. But Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) argues that Arthur did. No He has a split personality. He is not two people, says Dent. He is just Arthur, a sick and sad man. Therefore, he should be held responsible for his actions and found guilty.

This debate is at the heart of “Joker: Folie à Deux.” It’s even foretold by the film’s opening sequence: a 1940s Warner Bros. cartoon in which a Broadway version of Arthur backstage is literally taken over by his homicidal shadow (all to the tune of “Me and My Shadow”). But the reason it’s strange, and rather unexciting, to hear the movie chew over the split-personality question ad nauseum is that “Joker” already dug it in, in spectacular fashion. The premise of the first film, which treated Arthur as a sleazy sociopath straight out of a Scorsese fever dream, is that unlike dark-side characters in comic-book movies, Arthur is actually a sleazy sociopath who looks like … was Just a disturbed individual. Even when he put on his dirty clown makeup and red suit, he wasn’t a larger-than-life villain. He was just a run-of-the-mill loser pretending to be a larger-than-life villain.

And yet…such was the black magic of the film that this DIY Joker felt so much power coursing through him that in a strange way, somehow… did Did he become the Joker? Was he a split personality or just a sick loner? The delicious answer is that he was both.

And that’s what we long to see in Folie à Deux: Arthur, your average maniac who somehow, by embracing his Joker identity, transcends who he is. What’s so bad about the movie is how little it makes us feel that. There are plenty of scenes with Arthur dressed as the Joker, defending himself in the courtroom, singing this song or that, sometimes in fantasy numbers that could almost be happening in his head. But there’s no danger in his presence anymore. He’s not trying to kill anyone, and he’s not leading a revolution. He’s just singing and (sometimes) dancing his way into his Joker reverie.

In “Joker,” after Arthur shot those three men on the subway, he went into a dirty public bathroom and performed this strange tai chi dance that expressed his new power. He felt serene, liberated, reborn in his violence. In that moment, he became the Joker.

A musical number can do something similar. It is there to elevate ordinary characters, to put them (and us) in touch with the strength of their secret selves. In contemporary film musicals, what we want to see more than ever, what we want to feel, is for characters to take on an emotion and soaring With her. We want to see them transformed. In our time, the film that rewrote the rules of that experience was “Moulin Rouge.” The beauty, the insolence, the aesthetic collisions (the fact that dancers and bohemians in fin-de-siècle Paris sang “Lady Marmalade” and “Your Song”) were all part of the transcendence. One could sense a bit of that same emotion in “Dancer in the Dark,” Lars von Trier’s musical that combines female sacrifice with Björk.

I’m not saying that all modern movie musicals have to be like this. I thoroughly enjoyed “Hairspray” and “Chicago.” But the premise of “Joker: Folie à Deux”—that Arthur, the killer clown, and his lover, Lee (who begins to believe she’s Harley Quinn), will express who they are by becoming jukebox songbirds… I’m sorry, but that’s not a Broadway concept. It’s a bold A concept that demands bold execution, and for the most part, that doesn’t happen in Folie à Deux.

Phillips, who co-wrote the script with Scott Silver, should have gone with a wilder selection of songs. And the song choice you’d think would have pointed to that is the supreme needle drop in “Joker” – that snippet of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” as Joker dances down the West 167th Street stairs. That might have been the best moment in the movie. It was the defining moment. When Phillips announced that “Joker 2” was going to be a musical, wasn’t it more than obvious that That’s the scene Should this have been the guiding spirit of the sequel?

There are a couple of sequences in “Folie à Deux” that hint at what the movie should have been: a Sonny-and-Cher-esque edit of “The Joker and Harley Show” where the two sing the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” or the gospel number “Gonna Build a Mountain,” which Gaga belts out. For the most part, though, the songs in “Folie à Deux” don’t blow us away or shake us or make our eyes shine. And they don’t make us swoon, either.

The casting of Lady Gaga certainly sounded promising, because she’s a great actress and was put on earth (among other things) to do musicals. But Gaga, who has a lovely, spontaneous presence in “Folie à Deux,” is drastically underused. Her Lee never quite takes off. Gaga has a nice quiet moment singing “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” (Speaking of Burt Bacharach, why did Phillips waste one of his only musical selections, “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” on that opening cartoon?) But the number doesn’t build. Gaga never gets a chance to do what she did in “A Star Is Born”: capture the audience with her ecstasy.

I should mention that there isn’t enough going on in “Folie à Deux.” The movie runs for two hours and 18 minutes and here is the full plot:

Arthur is languishing in Arkham State Hospital. He meets Lee, who is devoted to him. He goes to trial and debate rages over whether he has a split personality or is simply a criminal. A verdict is reached. A fateful bomb explodes. The end.

As a critic, I’ve lived through my share of debates, but I’ve never understood the morally critical edge that weighed on the reviews of “Joker.” The fact that the film invited us to deeply identify with a twisted sociopath was not, in my view, a weakness; it was a strength. (It’s for this very reason that I love “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Taxi Driver” and “Natural Born Killers.”) The film was, among other things, an allegory for the Trump era, but it’s almost as if the critics were saying, “We don’t like the movie because Arthur is a nasty incel who leads an uprising just like Trump.” To me, the reviews of “Joker” were comparable to a studio executive basically saying, “Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’ isn’t likable enough.”

Did the critics become cautious executive scolds with “Joker”? In my opinion, yes. But the upshot is that Todd Phillips, making what I think is a huge mistake, listened to them. “Joker: Folie à Deux” may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but at its core it is an overly cautious sequel. Phillips has made a movie in which Arthur really is just poor Arthur; he does nothing wrong and is not going to threaten anyone’s moral sensibilities. In fact, he ruins the only good thing that has ever happened to him in life (winning the love of Harley Quinn, played by Lee) because he denies the Joker in himself. He is now simply a singing, dancing puppet clown who lives in his imagination. that Entertainment? I suspect audiences will still flock to see Folie à Deux. But when it comes to bold commercial cinema, it’s the critics who have the last laugh.

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