Even Lady Gaga can't save this film.

In 2019, a year now separated from us by so many catastrophic global events that it feels like a distant archaeological era, the film jokerLike it or not (I certainly didn't), it was a big deal. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and later received eleven Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture. Lead actor Joaquin Phoenix ultimately won Best Actor for his portrayal of a mentally ill wannabe comedian turned murderous clown. The film also became the subject of heated debate and no small amount of hand-wringing. Would his portrait of the comic book villain as a lonely, misunderstood victim of mistreatment by a vaguely defined “society” inspire imitators to chaotic acts? joker Perhaps the film teetered uneasily on the balance between criticizing incel violence and promoting it, but thankfully its many admirers held back their enthusiasm until the box office, where the film grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, breaking the all-time record an R-rated film.

Five years later, jokerDirector and co-writer Todd Phillips has returned with a sequel that takes an unseen – and on paper, fascinating – new direction: our wretched antihero has become, of all things, the singing, dancing protagonist of his own private musical. Much could be said about Phillips' implementation of this idea, most of it rightly negative. By any reasonable measure, this is a terrible film, too long and too self-serious and far too dramaturgically sluggish, a regrettable waste of its leads' boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles. But no one could blame him Joker: Folie à Deux that it's just a cash grab that lazily reuses the mood, themes or plot structure of its predecessor.

Phillips' decision to pit a pop supernova like Lady Gaga against the darkly charismatic Phoenix, and then ask them both to sing live to the film on a jukebox soundtrack of more than a dozen well-known songs, has an admirable boldness ranging from Broadway standards of the 1940s (“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”) Buddy Joey) to the easy listening pop of the 1970s (The Carpenters “Close to You”). Granted, the director doesn't manage to exceed the bar he's set for himself – he sometimes fails to scrape the skin from his knees to his ankles – but it's fair to say that the This film's problems have little or nothing to do with its premise's attempted magic trick. More than anything, it's the craziness of the trick and the stars' doomed dedication to pulling it off that makes it Joker: Folie à Deux even minimally viewable.

joker ended with Phoenix's Arthur Fleck locked up in a mental institution, but apparently on the verge of escaping to begin his career as Batman's nemesis. Instead, Slide for two finds Arthur still locked up in the inhumane Arkham State Hospital in Gotham City. Arthur was found competent in a mental health hearing and is about to stand trial for the murders of five people, one of which was broadcast live on television. (Since he confesses in front of more people than he probably should, there are actually six if you include his mother.) Outside the asylum's grimy walls, he has become a folk hero to a certain group of clown-masked nihilists and a tabloid bogeyman for the general public. But in the hospital, Arthur remains a pitiful loser, ridiculed by his fellow inmates and treated with alternate kindness and cruelty by an Irish prison guard (Brendan Gleeson).

Phillips' desire to engage with audiences' genre expectations is evident from the jump. The first thing audiences see after a vintage WB logo is a cartoon short called “Me and My Shadow,” animated by the Triplets from Belleville Filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in a style reminiscent of classic Looney Tunes. In it, Arthur's shadow self leaves his body to commit crimes for which the real man is then blamed. The cartoon's plot is a literal implementation of the defense that its sympathetic lawyer (Catherine Keener) will later use in court: she believes that Arthur is the victim of dissociative identity disorder, a formerly abused child who invented the character of the Joker as an option , to vent his otherwise inaccessible anger. It's not clear whether the film wants us to agree with her assessment or that of Gotham Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent (industryis Harry Lawtey), who thinks Arthur is just a sociopath faking mental illness to avoid the consequences he deserves.

Meanwhile, Lee Quinzel (Gaga), an arsonist serving a sentence in Arkham's minimum security ward, has a completely different idea of ​​the Joker: She's a groupie, has followed his crime spree on the news and is obsessed with watching a TV biography about him viewed once. (Even fans who didn't enjoy the aggressive marketing won't be long recognizing her as the future Harley Quinn.) When placed in the same music therapy group – a place where cheerful sing-alongs are touted as a healing counterpoint to the gloom of institutional life – Lee and Arthur bond immediately and soon develop their own, more twisted motivations for breaking out into song. When they are together or apart and think about each other, their inner monologues bubble to the surface as ready-made classics of the American songbook. This is despite the fact that Lee, for her part, doesn't seem to be a big fan of the music genre. When the institution shows the MGM classic The band wagon On movie night, Lee is so bored that she sets fire to the piano in the lounge. Didn't like it The band wagon should certainly serve as a warning sign to any potential suitor, but Lee later makes up for her taste when the hitherto infatuated couple release a cover of the musical's most enduring number, “That's Entertainment.”

Joker: Folie à Deux may not be the first musical to posit the idea of ​​its song and dance sequences as the emanations of a delusional mind, but it must be among those that contradict this conceit most vehemently. Scene after scene, often with barely a break in dialogue in between, either Lee, Arthur, or both together channel the intensity of an emotional moment by delivering a breathy version of one popular pop hit or another. As in a Hollywood musical, invisible string orchestras may step in to accompany these flights of fancy, but the supporting characters never join in and rarely seem to notice that a serenade is taking place. With rare exceptions (like the rock-'em-sock-'em Gaga cover of “That's Life” that plays during the credits), most vocal performances occur Slide for two are deliberately disappointing in terms of virtuosity: they're hoarse, raspy and, in Phoenix's case, often half-spoken, more suited to a tipsy karaoke night than the Broadway stage.

Gaga has pointed out in interviews that neither she nor the character of Phoenix are professional entertainers. So why would they sing like that? It's a reasonable point, but also a less polite point that she doesn't make: If she were to sing at full strength rather than reining in her usual vocal splendor, the contrast would throw Phoenix's adequate but limited baritone into unflattering relief. But what causes the songs, all compelling players, to blur into a monotonous wall of sound has less to do with the quality of the performance and more to do with the constant onslaught of musical numbers and the inertia of the story in between. Very little happens within us other than building up internal emotions to the point that they have to be expressed over and over again in song Slide for two. Arthur is declared fit to stand trial, goes to trial and is returned to the desolate confines of his cell every night by the cruel guards. A few well-known characters from the first part jokerincluding Zazie Beetz as Arthur's former neighbor, arrive to take the stand, and at some point the proceedings are interrupted by a horrific act of violence. But the story's forward movement is so minimal and so punctuated by long stretches of musical stasis that the result hardly feels like a film. It's more of a work by joker Fanfic created not only by the aforementioned screenwriters (Phillips and Scott Silver, who also co-wrote the 2019 film), but also by Phoenix and Gaga themselves in what appears to be a collaborative project to revise the script in real time during filming.

The fact that Slide for two The self-referential quality of a fanfiction does not necessarily mean that it will be well received by the actual ones joker Fans will likely be left scratching their heads when it comes to a sequel to a comic book supervillain that features virtually no fight scenes, a single chase scene that ends about a minute into it, and barely a moment that could be classified as exciting . The main question that the viewer has to answer is not: “What will happen next?” But “Is this all happening in the real world or just in their heads?” – an epistemological puzzle that alone is not enough to answer ours Maintaining energy for almost two hours and 20 minutes. What's even more confusing is that all the time we've spent inside the psyches of two deeply disturbed characters gives us little insight into their motivations. The pathetic Arthur Fleck remains, as I called him in my 2019 review of the film, a “poor little clown,” while Gaga's Lee is so confident that we're not sure until the end whether she's a vulnerable fangirl or a heartless femme Fatal is. If he is, as the lyrics to “That's Entertainment” say, “the clown with his pants falling down,” is she simply “the rock who gives him shit”? Making Gaga's character little more than a mirror that reflects the Joker back at himself (in alternately flattering and unflattering ways) is a real waste of this powerful performer, whose life experience as a stadium-filling superstar leaves her with no shortage of insight into the psychology of fame monsters .

Without giving away the ending, it's safe to say that Phillips seems to be eliminating the possibility of anyone begging for more. That's probably a blessing for both the filmmaker and us, because this dark, confused and maudlin film seems to have been made by someone who captivates his characters and his audience Contempt.