A halfhearted defense of Joker: Folie à Deux

Let’s be clear upfront, Joker: Folie à Deux is not a good movie. This isn’t an attempt to argue that it’s a secret masterpiece that nobody understood, because there’s a lot about the movie that doesn’t work. But despite not being very good, Joker: Folie à Deux is a really interesting movie at least in what it’s trying to accomplish. 

To look at Joker: Folie à Deux, we really need to look at what the first movie was about. Back when promoting the first Joker movie, director Todd Phillips was always upfront about how he viewed the movie. Phillips was never interested in making a comic book movie, but liked the idea of a smaller, grittier movie that would explore the character’s more fully.

In a way the movie was almost like a trick. If the studios aren’t funding intimate character pieces anymore, but they are funding comic book movies, we’ll sneak in a character piece by pretending it’s a comic book movie. The resulting movie clearly drew more inspiration from Martin Scorsese films from the 1980s than it did from anything in the DC universe. It was different from pretty much any other DC or comic book movie that was coming out. And then it made a billion dollars. 

Joker: Folie à Deux had massive expectations

It’s worth taking a moment to really stress how big of a hit Joker was. It was the first rated R movie to ever break a billion dollars and as of this writing is still one of only two movies to ever hit that milestone. This level of success was unexpected, and seemed to almost frustrate director Todd Phillips. After all, he’s trying to make a character study and here is the audience treating it like a superhero blockbuster. And when a movie is this successful, that means, among other things, a sequel. 

Phillips always said that the first Joker movie was not meant to start a franchise, but when a movie makes a billion dollars, and is technically based on a comic book, the studio is going to want another one. But on the other hand, making a movie that brings in a billion dollars gives you a certain amount of leeway. So suddenly, Todd Phillips is faced with the task of making a sequel that he wasn’t necessarily interested in making, but at the same time pretty much able to do whatever he wants with the movie. It’s this rare set of circumstances that created the perfect storm for Joker: Folie à Deux to be made. 

Joker: Folie à Deux, in a way, is Todd Phillips trying to explain to you that what happened with the first Joker movie wasn’t supposed to happen. Audiences weren’t supposed to get on board and push the movie into a billion dollar phenomenon. They weren’t supposed to create a scenario where a sequel is inevitable. You liked the first movie wrong. 

Joker: Folie à Deux challenges fans of the first film

And so, Joker: Folie à Deux puts the first movie (and its fanbase) on trial. Literally. The trial storyline that creates the backbone for the film gives the sequel the chase to relitigate exactly what happened in the first movie. Rather than have Joker do more Joker things, more murder and crime, this movie spends its time focused on the character of Arthur, and really driving home how the events of the first movie resulted in the deaths of multiple people. The movie wants to drive home the point that this story does not take place in a comic book world. Even though it has places like Gotham and Arkham, the events of these two movies have consequences. 

As Joker: Folie à Deux explores the fallout from the events of the first movie, it’s also exploring the impact that the first movie had here in the real world. Joker: Folie à Deux introduces Harley Quinn, a character that’s fascinated by Joker for all the wrong reasons. She tells him how seeing Joker appear on the Murray Franklin show in the first movie made her feel like she wasn’t alone. She wants to be Joker’s partner in all of his Joker activities going forward.

Read More: Quentin Tarantino praises Joker: Folie à Deux despite its tepid fan response

The only problem is, audiences weren’t really supposed to identify with Joker the first time around. Sympathize with him of course. See him as a complete and complicated person, that was what the filmmakers were going for. But Phillips never wanted you to come away thinking that Joker was a hero, or that his actions were justified. You have to imagine the fact that people were making pilgrimages to a specific set of stairs to recreate the Joker dance was never the kind of devotion that Phillips was expecting the character to get.

So, when grappling with the fanbase of the first movie, he created a stand in character to represent everyone who liked the first movie “incorrectly.” Joker: Folie à Deux even drives this point home by making Harley Quinn a character who likes being in the world of Joker for fun, but has a full life outside that she’s free to return to whenever she wants. 

The film is bold even when it doesn't fully work

None of this is what fans of the first movie wanted to see in the second movie. And Joker: Folie à Deux is aware of that fact. At one point in one of the musical sequences, Joker literally stops the performance to say “I don’t think we’re giving the people what they want.” In the final moments of the courtroom scene It fully strips the Joker identity away and focuses the narrative on Arthur rather than Joker.

When Harley, as the audience surrogate character, meets Arthur on the famous Joker steps, she walks away because this isn’t the Joker that she signed up for.  The movie is going out of its way to make sure that fans of the first movie don’t get what they were hoping for from the second movie. And then, to really drive the point home, Todd Phillips ends the movie by making sure that there won’t be another sequel that seems inevitable, no matter how good the box office is. 

So, does this mean that Joker: Folie à Deux is secretly a masterpiece? No. It’s still an incredibly flawed movie. Joker: Folie à Deux seems like it’s trying to criticize both fans and detractors of the first movie, often putting the movie at odds with itself. The idea to make the film a musical is a pretty fascinating one, but it seems uncommitted as to what the musical elements are trying to accomplish at different points. It’s a messy film, but these days it’s so rare to see a big budget studio movie take such a bizarre approach that it’s still interesting to watch, even when it misses the mark.