A bro-comedy director, a Method-y actor, and a pop star walk into a bar — and that’s as close to a joke as you’ll get with Joker: Folie à Deux, the inevitable sequel/event du jour, released within five weeks of an election in which the most evil-clownish of American electees seeks to re-enter the presidency and turn the federal system into scorched earth. Coincidence? Released in the middle of That Guy’s first term, Joker (2019) seemed, in its torrent of discomfort, to be expressing a nihilistic and self-pitying anger uncannily personified by the whining president of the day; like him, Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck was a spuming spectacle of emotional toxicity. Enough consumers seemed to empathize with both to make some of us fantasize about time travel — back to 1966, say, when Lyndon Johnson was pressing federal indictments on the Klan and Cesar Romero played the Joker, cartoonishly, on TV. The new movie’s participation in our cultural now-ness might not be as noticeable — it is, for one thing, something of a repetitious drag. It’s not all for lack of effort: While director Todd Phillips’s first Joker performed the unlikely feat of converting yet another comic-book backstory sequel into an Oscar-winning reconstitution of the Martin Scorsese ’70s, and Taxi Driver in particular, the inevitable sequel looks to be the new New York, New York — sort of. (There remain plenty of reasons why remaking Scorsese’s sour 1977 musical would not have been a great idea.) Much more of a deliberately old-timey songfest and a patience-testing courtroom drama than an episode in any DC-verse franchise strategy, Phillips’s headlong psychodrama seems destined to frustrate the fanboys who found themselves wicking to the first film’s edge-of-violence anarchy. We’ll see. There’s reason to be cynical about this two-step project — the first film, because it took itself so seriously, couldn’t quite be dismissed as just comic-book dross, but it could very well be dismissed for other things, including the filmmakers playing loose and stupid with the realities of mental illness. That hasn’t changed; I’m still looking forward to a damning address in the APA’s Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. We start with a rather on-the-nose introductory fake Looney Tunes cartoon, in which the Joker battles for supremacy with his own shadow, then we land in Arkham Asylum, where Phoenix’s emaciated bad boy is a narcotized zombie, taunted by guards (including Brendan Gleeson) and awaiting his competency trial. As is de rigueur for this world, the color palette stretches from green mold to brown mold. (And I never appreciated the co-optation of Arkham by the DC-verse, which has shit-all to do with Lovecraft.) Bearing a visage that could have made him a German Expressionist star in the ’20s, a great Renfield to Max Schreck’s Orlock, Phoenix is nevertheless out-acted by his own alarmingly protrusive scapulas. Anything could happen, you’d think, but the screenplay, by Phillips and Scott Silver, decides to keep the characters running in place. Arthur jolts a bit from his waking coma after spotting Lee (Lady Gaga), a pyro patient in another ward to which Arthur, being a now-docile mass murderer, is allowed to go. They’re soulmates from the first glance, apparently, and the next two hours are divided more or less evenly between story contrivances so the two can be alone together, the intrusive dreamtime musical numbers, and the murder trial (Arthur is deemed competent after all). A strange stasis falls over the film — there are skirmishes and conflagrations and erratic peaks and valleys in Arthur’s Joker-y sense of empowerment, but we always end up back where we started. In fact, most of the story entails recalling and rehashing the events of the first film, over and over again, as if it were Hamlet or something. The earlier killings are never disputed, just reiterated in a confused debate, in and out of the naturally unconvincing trial scenes, about Arthur’s being responsible for himself or not, because of the traumatic scars from his miserable life. Miserable it is, but what little forward propulsion the movie has vanishes when Arthur turns a homicidal-fantasy corner, fires his lawyer (a beleaguered Catherine Keener), and decides to act as his own attorney, in full clown makeup. This doesn’t go well, for him or us, stalling the film further in unfunny courtroom stunts and confrontations, running the clock down, as it were. That is, until the what-the-fuck-ness of it is interrupted by a “Holy deux ex machina Batman” kaboom that explicitly and cheaply echoes the streets of downtown on 9/11, and made me want to puke. The songs, you should be warned, are nearly all old show tunes and Top 40 standards, from MGM musicals of the ’50s to Burt Bacharach to Stevie Wonder, breathily warbled by Gaga and tunelessly rasped by Phoenix. Every musical number stops the story and overemphasizes some simple narrative moment. (We get “That’s Entertainment!” three times, once in a clip from 1953’s The Band Wagon.) The two main characters’ overactive fantasy life is, in fact, the film’s primary postulate — the battle between reality and showbiz fantasy (usually depicted as cheesy ’70s TV shows) is waged, often rhetorically, in virtually every scene, but what exactly Phillips et al. are accusing 20th-century pop culture of is far from clear. On the stand, a psychiatrist opines that Arthur’s illness is “just performance”; later, during his piteous closing monologue to the jury, the judge (Bill Smitrovich) tells the clown, “You are not on a stage.” Back and forth it goes, repeating the same essentially empty question, ad infinitum. That is, when the two protagonists are not making such a big deal about smoking cigarettes you’d think they were mainlining chocolate ketamine. All the same, you can’t deny that Phoenix has built something unforgettable here, over two overlong films: an electrocuted portrait of flailing, self-aware anguish. But he’s done it grindingly, repetitively, like he was working a 12-hour shift beheading chickens. Meanwhile, outside in a Gotham full of clown masks and police brutality, the Joker remains some kind of anarchist cult hero, which is as dumb and confounding, if not deliberately so, as the persistent blight of Trumperism in our social water table right now, like lead in the blood.  But what if, in the end, that’s the corollary the filmmakers are reaching for? It’d be hard to swallow, but if so, you could walk away thinking that the ultimate failure of Jokerism might be, for all of the movie’s absurd dissatisfactions, a sign of hope. That would at least be something. ❖ The post Review: Despite the Moldy Tunes, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Is Not Your Father’s Nihilism appeared first on LA Weekly.