Joker (2019)

There's a moment in Joker where Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck catches his own reflection, contorting his face into a smile with his own fingers, forcing joy onto a face that has forgotten how to produce it naturally. It's deeply uncomfortable. It's also completely brilliant. And it tells you everything you need to know about what kind of film Todd Phillips has made here: this isn't a superhero film, not really. It's a character study, raw and unrelenting, dressed up in the iconography of one.

Phoenix gives what I'd comfortably call a career-best performance. The physical commitment alone is staggering. The jerky, uncoordinated movements, the laugh that erupts from him like something involuntary and painful, the way his body seems to shrink into itself in public and then unfurl in private moments of delusion. He makes Arthur Fleck a man so marginalised, so invisible to the world around him, that you understand his collapse even when you can't endorse it. That's a difficult tightrope to walk, and Phoenix never once loses his footing.

The world Phillips builds around him is equally impressive. Gotham here is essentially 1970s New York, all crumbling facades, rubbish-strewn streets, and fluorescent-lit misery. The dimly lit apartments feel suffocating. The decaying subway tunnels feel dangerous. Even the talk-show stage, all bright lights and false warmth, has something predatory about it. The score underpins everything with a kind of mournful dread. Every technical element is pointed in the same direction: make the audience feel the weight of this man's existence. It works.

There's also something pointed in how the film taps into real anxieties: about inequality, about how societies discard the mentally ill, about the way neglect and cruelty can curdle into something monstrous over time. It doesn't shy away from any of that. Whether it handles all of it responsibly is a fair question to ask, and I think the film occasionally tips toward romanticising violence rather than interrogating it. But I don't think it crosses a line so much as it dances near one.

My reservations are real, though. The film is sometimes more mood piece than story. There are stretches where it's so committed to atmosphere that it loses narrative momentum, and you become aware that you're watching a very accomplished exercise rather than a fully realised drama. And then there's the unavoidable comparison: I wrote at length about The Dark Knight and the extraordinary, chaotic energy Heath Ledger brought to the character, and that version of the Joker exists as a force defined by opposition. He has Batman. He has order to disrupt. He has mythic stakes. This Joker has none of that. He exists in a vacuum, which gives Phoenix enormous space to perform but leaves the film feeling strangely unmoored from the larger legend it's borrowing from.

Without that foil, without the moral counterweight that makes the Joker's chaos so compelling in the comics, this version can only go so far. The result is a psychological drama that's genuinely powerful in places but never quite achieves the tragic grandeur it's reaching for. It's good. It's very good. Phoenix alone makes it essential viewing. But the film around him, brilliant as it often is, isn't quite operating at the same altitude.

Three and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-08-05

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Todd Phillips: Old School (2003) · Road Trip (2000)
More with Joaquin Phoenix: Gladiator (2000) · Walk the Line (2005) · Signs (2002)
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More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
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