Joker Folie a Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, is in cinemas. (Photos: Todd Phillips/ Instagram)
What does it mean to be a courageous filmmaker? In some cases, it means taking a chance on a largely unknown cast for a franchise film with a rabid, easily-offended fan base (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story). It could mean adding an unexpected twist to a reliable formula, like taking a classic break-up story but packaging it in horror (Midsommar) or updating a tropey old genre, such as with a violent film about criminals that is also laugh-out-loud funny (Pulp Fiction). Mostly, though, it means letting your characters take you where they will, demands of the audience and studio — and even the plot — be damned.
By that count, Todd Phillips is a very brave filmmaker. Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to his blockbuster 2019 film Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, has been panned by critics (“sluggish”, “a waste of Lady Gaga’s talent”, “confusing”) and viewers (“hates its most devoted fanbase”, “lame musical”) alike. The $190 million budget film bombed with a $37 million domestic opening (international collections, at nearly $100 million, have been better) and earned a ‘D’ CinemaScore, the lowest ever for any film based on a comic. And yet, in one very important way, not only is it one of the best and most courageous films of the year, it also offers one of the most invaluable lessons in writing — whether film, novel or short story — for the price of a movie ticket. It shows why any creator must not only have a deep understanding of her creation, but must also be willing to go along on whatever wild ride said creation – and their story — takes her on.
The most famous practitioner of this approach is Stephen King who has gone on record several times, including in his memoir On Writing, about the writing process being an act of faith in one’s characters and their journey. While King’s output over the decades has varied vastly in terms of scale (grand epics like The Stand, alongside the intimate, interior horrors of Gerald’s Game or The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and quality (unputdownable classics like Misery and The Shining alongside unreadable daubs like The Dreamcatcher), the one consistent feature has been commitment to character. All it takes is understanding the character and exactly how they would react in a given situation (the sum total of which we call “story”), and trusting the process. In over five decades, with 65 novels/novellas and more than 200 short stories, King has shown again and again how this approach can pay off. Would the grieving father in Pet Sematary, with the knowledge of a way to bring his beloved son back to life, make any decision other than the disastrous one he made? Would the savagely bullied Carrie, recently possessed of an uncanny power, not have laid to waste her entire school after the one humiliation that went too far?
Todd Phillips, in both Joker and its 2024 sequel, has proved that he understands why this is the most compelling — some might argue, the only — way to tell a story. It paid off big with Joker, which not only broke collection records and scored more than a few awards, but also managed to win over the notoriously tough-to-please comic-book fans. It was beside the point that their understanding of the film — the origin story of a beloved villain from the Batman universe — diverged sharply from what the film actually was — a look at how a mentally unwell person might reach a breaking point in a society that, as Arthur Fleck/Joker, says in the film “treats him like trash”. Joker owed little to the Batman universe, except its starting point and a few references along the way: Most of the frame, and almost all the flesh, blood and creative spark that animated the film came entirely from Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver (with a little tipping of the hat to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy).
The problem with Joker: Folie à Deux, from the perspective of those who loved the first film, is that it dares to continue down the same road of faithfully telling the story of this character, Arthur Fleck and his desperate resort to the Joker persona, rather than the story of the Joker himself. Phillips, it turned out, was still committed to his character, and not to the comic books that provided the original inspiration. That Phillips and his film were not very interested in the formidable Batman villain, but in the weak, scared and vulnerable man who (spoiler alert) may or may not become that villain, was the ultimate betrayal for the fandom. Fleck, indeed, disowns his Joker persona entirely by the end of the sequel, owning responsibility for his crimes and accepting, finally, that no one, not even the mobs who have rioted and looted in his name or the woman who claims to love him, see him for who he really is.
Joker: Folie à Deux defies the very logic of the comic-book universe that somewhere, out of sight at the moment, perhaps, there is a hero (or anti-hero) who will upend an order that does nothing for the poor and the weak, and who, rather than turning the other cheek, will blow the whole system to bits. It’s an appealing fantasy in its own way — and is an important reason why, in the Batman stories, the Joker, who embodies anarchy as against the Caped Crusader’s order, is such a compelling villain. But that was not where Phillips was interested in going. He gave Arthur Fleck — briefly a hero for the downtrodden in a terrible world but really just a lonely, abused individual not entirely in his right mind — the only possible story, and ending, he could. That is writing, that is storytelling.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
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First uploaded on: 12-10-2024 at 17:12 IST
