![]() ![]() The man at the center of this impeccably rotting frame is Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), already the saddest of sacks when we meet him in the summer of 1981. His filmmaking here has a powerful and uncharacteristic lucidity, and his vision of Gotham City has its own squalid grandeur, rooted in the gloomy interiors of Mark Friedberg’s production design and the deep, enveloping shadows of Lawrence Sher’s cinematography. Phillips has long been a Hollywood specialist in the comedy of stunted male misbehavior (the “Hangover” movies, “Old School”), and in “Joker,” the barely disguised misanthropic streak that animated his earlier films comes to full, spiky fruition. In ‘Joker’ the stakes are life and death, and comic-book movies may never be the sameĪnd let us give this particular devil his due, as the Venice International Film Festival jury did last month when it handed “Joker” the prestigious Golden Lion for best film.‘Joker’ ending explained: Director Todd Phillips on fan theories and open questions.Is ‘Joker’ a dangerous movie? Our critics have it out. ![]() But we are also seeing the disintegration of a man’s psyche in a story that seeks to elicit our pity as well as our terror. ![]() We are witnessing the formation of a classic Gotham City persona: the white-faced, purple-suited maniac who has haunted the public’s imagination since his first comic-book appearance in the 1940s. With impressive skill and commitment, the director and his star, Joaquin Phoenix, reverse the moral logic of the origin story, replacing its sense of emergent order with a dark plunge into alienation and chaos. “Joker,” Todd Phillips’ sensationally grim new movie about the fall and rise of Batman’s greatest nemesis, fulfills these conventions so that it can turn them violently inside out. The complications of his family life, the realization of the talents that set him apart, the embrace of a symbolically powerful alter ego: All these familiar beats can be orchestrated and synthesized in ways that will seem both recognizable and revelatory to a shrewd, pop-savvy audience. We know that Bruce Wayne will one day put on some hosiery and swoop past skyscrapers, but how he arrives there, as he did in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” (2005), needn’t be a foregone conclusion. The best superhero origin stories draw their power from a strange, durable tension: an inevitable destination but an unpredictable journey. ![]()
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