Joker: Folie à Deux reminds me a lot of the last time Todd Phillips waded into sequel waters to follow up an box office mega hit. Hangover Part ll is a fairly straightforward cashgrab, a copy and paste exercise on autopilot. Hangover Part lll, however, is a different cans of worms. I’m not sure if it’s good, but it’s about as cynical and anti-sequel in its approach as a movie can be. Folie à Deux has Phillips back in this zone, which makes his Joker sequel both more and less interesting than its predecessor.
Folie à Deux, more or less, is a chamber drama split between a courtroom and Arkham Jail. That part may surprise people. The part that isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s paid attention to news on the sequel (and I don’t blame anyone for skipping over those tidbits), is that it’s a musical. Maybe it’s more fair to say it has musical sequences rather than being a full-on song and dance affair. Regardless, Joker is here and he does sing and dance and spend a lot of time in court and in jail.
The bulk of the plot follows the trial of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). The bulk of the story is about Arthur’s psyche and the battle between the Arthur and Joker raging inside him. Aiding him along the way is his lawyer, Maryanne (Catherine Keener), Arkham State Hospital patient Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), and prison guard Jackie (Brendan Gleeson). Watching those three bounce off Phoenix is a delight, a sincere highlight in a movie hellbent on undercutting expectations. Gaga makes the strongest impression, but that’s almost a given considering she’s playing the character with the strongest name recognition.
I’m not a big comic person in general so my knowledge of the Harley-Joker dynamic comes from past movies I didn’t care for. So take it with a grain of salt when I say this is the most interested I’ve been in their relationship. The scenes between Gaga and Phoenix are consistently strong. The dichotomy between their stolen conversations within the prison/hospital and the musical set pieces play into the movie’s larger themes of personality and mental health. It’s a simple metaphor and the execution makes it work.
Folie à Deux is a prickly movie that is less of a provocation than Joker. The first movie took on the burden of criticism for its depiction of mental illness and I’m curious if this one draws the same ire. Phillips and Silver double down on the mental health theme without taking as many chances. For the most part Folie à Deux handles its violence differently. There is more figurative or imagined violence than real world violence and that conceit avoids the more direct conflation of mental health and violence that fueled the vitriol aimed at Joker.
Aside from Phoenix and Phillips, most of the key collaborators from Joker are back, including co-writer Scott Silver and composer Hildur Guonadóttir. Between the two movies I think my biggest critique is that they sound more interesting on paper than they end up being on film. Coming off Joker, and the tendency for sequels to go bigger and louder, it’s not hard to picture a version of Folie à Deux that is a Joker and Harley Quinn crime spree movie. Give Phillips and Silver credit for not taking the cheese on that one. No one mistook Joker for a crowd pleaser, but Folie à Deux feels like an act of self-sabotage at times. For that, and Gaga’s performance, I kept help but begrudgingly respect what Folie à Deux serves up.
