Dysfunction abounds in
The Franchise. (Photo: Courtesy HBO)
The big news in film this week is the dramatic box office underperformance of Joker: Folie à Deux. Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 mega-hit “only” made $40 million over its first three days of release in North America. But since this courtroom drama musical cost about $200 million to make, that’s a problem.
Maybe it’s time to ask why anyone would think it’s worth paying $200 million for a courtroom drama musical starring one of our greatest living actors, Joaquin Phoenix, as an evil clown, and Lady Gaga, an innovative pop star, as the evil clown’s psychiatrist/girlfriend/also evil clown. Surely these extraordinary talents could be put to better use, not to mention the thousands of other artists and craftspeople whose hard work went into making yet another picture based on Batman. But that’s exactly why this misfire was green-lit by Warner Brothers, when so many better, cheaper ideas are left to rot in the field: because it’s based on a superhero comic book.
For most of this century, comic adaptations have been popular with mass audiences. Some of the films have been good. Most of them have not. Several of them are among the worst movies ever made. But they all cost a fortune to produce. The mainline studios have put all of their eggs in one basket because, as the old Hollywood saying goes, lots of people have gotten fired for saying yes to a new idea, but no one ever got fired for saying no. The studios’ extreme risk aversion has resulted in an avalanche of same-y products aimed at a deeply jaded audience.
Ironically, the new HBO Max series The Franchise was also green-lit because it’s about superheroes. But The Franchise comes not to praise flying men in tights, but to bury them. This is not the first time someone has trained a satirical lens on the superhero plague; The Boys has been going strong for four seasons over at Amazon. But Veep creator Jon Brown’s series is the first deep dive into the deeply dysfunctional environment at the studios where the product is extruded.
The Franchise’s first episode, “Scene 31 A: Tecto Meets Eye,” is the tightest comedy pilot I’ve seen in recent memory. There are some heavy hitters involved, like Sam Mendes, director of two James Bond films. Like his stunning 1917, Mendes leads off with a series of sweeping long takes. We follow Dag (Lolly Adefope) as she arrives for her first day on the set of Tecto, the latest big budget studio picture starring Adam (Billy Magnussen) as “The Earthquake Guy.” She reports to Daniel (Himesh Patel), the first assistant director. Putting an AD at the center of the story is a good move. Like the Army is run by sergeants, film sets are run by the ADs — even though no one involved would ever admit it. Daniel says his job is to “… keep the actors from killing each other, or themselves, and everything else.”
This means Daniel knows where all the bodies are buried. “You could run a children’s hospital on all the waste,” he muses. That’s why, when the studio head Pat “The Toy Man” Shannon (Darren Goldstein) pays an unexpected set visit, he corners Daniel in the bathroom to give him the skinny on how director Eric (Daniel Brühl) is doing. “I want to crack open your head and feed on the juice,” says Pat.
Eric is a familiar figure to anyone who reads Variety. His debut film The Unlikening is a low-budget masterpiece which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. This is his opportunity to break into the world of eight-figure paydays. But to The Toy Man, Eric is a semi-disposable rage sink who is mostly there to be blamed in case of a $40 million opening weekend. With 83 days to go in the shoot, Eric is beginning to understand how screwed he is. Everyone around him is either a sycophant, like Steph (Jessica Hynes) the script supervisor, or a social climber like Anita (Aya Cash), the new producer Pat’s putting in charge of the flailing production.
The cast is already purring like a well-oiled machine, with Richard E. Grant a highlight as the aging Shakespearian actor whose transphobic jokes make him a ticking PR time bomb. The writing is sharp, with a keen eye toward the interpersonal power dynamics and an ear for sneaky one-liners, like when Eric tells Adam to walk “like a panther on its way to a job interview.” Sure, The Franchise is inside baseball, but it’s also a lot of fun.
New episodes of The Franchise stream Sundays on HBO Max.
Lilly Sullivan cuts to the chase in Evil Dead Rise.
I know I say this a lot, but this time I really mean it: It’s a big weekend at the movies. While The Super Mario Bros. Movie continues to stack coins, there’s a whole slew of new releases, and a bunch of them look good.
First up is Evil Dead Rise. Sam Raimi’s 1983 horror film The Evil Dead slowly revolutionized the genre as its cult spread via VHS. In the 2000’s, the director would revolutionize the superhero genre with his still-undefeated Spider-Man trilogy. Now, Raimi has passed the reins to Irish director Lee Cronin for Evil Dead Rise, which has caught a lot of buzz in horror circles. In true Evil Dead fashion, it’s cheap ($15 million) and nasty. This is the Flyer, so I’m linking to the Red Band trailer.
Coming off an Indie Memphis preview screening, How To Blow Up A Pipeline is only playing on one screen in Cordova, but it may be the most consequential movie of the year. Director Daniel Goldhaber and actor Ariela Barer adapted author Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction book about radical eco-activists. A diverse group of people, radicalized by different things, band together to destroy an oil pipeline in West Texas.
Ari Aster is nothing if not divisive, and his latest is no different. Hereditary was a startling adrenaline rush with an all-time great performance from Toni Collette. Midsomer was a super creepy folk horror riff that helped make Florence Pugh an A-list actor. With Beau Is Afraid, Aster is again teaming up with an actor willing to do anything: Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau, who exists in a constant state of low- to medium-level panic attack. Co-starring as people causing Beau discomfort are Patti Lupone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, and Parker Posey.
Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a French musician widely regarded as the first African-descended person to achieve musical success in Europe. He fought racism in the aristocratic circles where he played, then put down his violin and picked up a sword to fight in the French Revolution. Kevin Harrison, Jr. stars as Chevalier and Lucy Boynton as Marie Antoinette.
On Wednesday, April 26th, at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis is throwing a benefit for OUTMemphis. Dressed In Blue is a groundbreaking 1983 film from Spain about six trans women who were feeling out the new world after the country had just emerged from decades of fascism under Franco. Vestida de Azul, as it is known in Spain, was directed by Antonio Giménez-Rico, and was unseen in the English speaking world for decades.
1000 Lights’ “666 Miles to Memphis” by Laura Jean Hocking at the Hometowner Music Video Showcase.
Day 4 of Indie Memphis is packed with life. It begins at 11:30 a.m at Playhouse on the Square with the world premiere of Ferny & Luca by director Andrew Infante. “The film is really interesting,” says Indie Memphis Artistic Director Miriam Bale. “It’s basically a rewriting of Saturday Night Fever, or a really diverse look at a rom-com. It really captures being in your twenties, and it’s a great New York movie.”
At 2 p.m. is one of the biggest gets for this year’s festival. C’mon C’mon is by writer/director Mike Mills, who got an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay for his 2016 film 20th Century Women. C’mon C’mon is a road picture starring Joaquin Phoenix as an introverted artist who has to take his precocious nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) on a cross-country trip. The film also stars indie darling Gaby Hoffmann, perhaps best known for the series Transparent. The A24 release has been a hot ticket for this year’s festival.
At 5 p.m. is another world premiere at Circuit, this time for a Hometowner feature. Life Ain’t Like the Movies is by Memphis director Robert Butler. It’s a coming of age drama about an awkward 16 year old who can’t escape bullying at school or conflict with his father at home.
At 9 p.m., an Indie Memphis tradition that has been the source of a lot of great nights at Playhouse on the Square over the years: The Secret Screening. Probably the most talked-about secret screening in festival history was 2019’s Uncut Gems, which wowed Memphis audiences before its smash-hit debut later that year. Bale wouldn’t divulge to me what film she has lined up this year (I even said “please”), but she would say this: “I definitely think everyone watching it will really love it, even if they’re surprised, and even if it’s something they wouldn’t have realized they would love.”
Across town at the Malco Summer Drive-In, after the revival of 1989’s Chameleon Street, is the Hometowner Music Video Showcase. As the curator of the Memphis Flyer’s Music Video Monday series, and a connoisseur of the form myself, I can say that Memphis punches way above its weight in the music video ring. We’ve got “Warzone” by Chinese Connection Dub Embassy; director Jordan Danielz and Sharrika Evans taking on Idi X Teco’s “Buzzsaw Kick”; Talibah Safiya’s “Animal Kingdom” by Zaire Love; Kim Bledsoe Lloyd’s clip for “My Mind Comes From a High Place” by Robert Allen Parker; two by Don Lifted and Josh Cannon; “Slide” by PreauXX, 35Miles, and AWFM; Laura Jean Hocking’s video for the London industrial band Dead Anyway; and many more. It’s gonna be a rocking night.
Earlier this year, Knox Shelton became executive director of Indie Memphis after the departure of former director Ryan Watt. Preparations for the 24th edition of the film festival, which will run from October 20-25, are well underway, but Shelton took a few hours out of his busy schedule to watch a movie he’s never seen before: Inherent Vice (2014, available at Black Lodge). Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Inherent Vice?
Knox Shelton: I know that it is a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, adapted from a novel by Thomas Pynchon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, a ton of other pretty well-known actors and actresses.
CM: Why did you pick this movie?
KS: One, it’s been on my watch list for a really long time. I’ve probably not watched it for the same reason that I’ve owned a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow for I don’t know for how many years, but I’ve never read it. And I told myself that I would read the Pynchon novel before watching the movie, and that’s probably not going to happen. So, it’s time to just watch this movie. And we’ve got the festival upcoming, so I was trying to find some great connections there. One of our films this year, C’mon C’mon, is starring Joaquin Phoenix, so I thought this would be a great film to watch.
150 minutes later…
CM: OK! Knox Shelton, you are now someone who has seen Inherent Vice. What did you think?
KS: I thought it was really good. It was really funny, which I don’t think I expected going into a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, given his most recent films. It’s definitely a movie, I think, to watch a few more times, to let it all sink in. I was immediately drawn into loving the dynamics between Bigfoot and Sportello. They were a really fun little pair.
CM: I have watched it a whole bunch of times and I see new stuff in it every time. Paul Thomas Anderson took the novel and did the whole thing in a screenplay format, and then edited it down into this movie. What really struck me this time was that this is Pynchon doing hard-boiled detective language. If you think about it, The Big Sleep and stuff like that has very flowery dialogue. But you don’t think of it as flowery, ’cause it’s being growled by Humphrey Bogart. That’s what I was really listening to this time, the musicality of the dialogue — really throughout the whole thing. Everybody kind of talks alike, but it’s just so beautiful that you don’t care.
KS: You’ve got this Big Lebowski element, where you’ve got the stoner detective. But the dialogue is so much more elevated, and of course other elements of the film, I think, are a little more elevated too. It’s really artistic and delightful throughout.
CM: I think you’re right that there is a straight line from The Big Lebowski to this movie. When this movie came out, a lot of people did not get it. I had a conversation with Craig Brewer where I was like, “Oh my God, have you seen this?” And he was just like, “Meh.” I fell in love with it immediately. But he was like, “People are whispering. I can’t understand what’s going on. They’re talking about characters who are never seen on the screen.” Well, yeah! But it really works for me. I have a real emotional attachment, I guess, to this movie.
Owen Wilson as Coy and Joaquin Phoenix as “Doc” Sportello
CM: So, you’re a head of a film festival now. How do you sell something like this to a festival crowd? It’s kind of an “eat your vegetables” thing for some people. But on the other hand, like you said, you were surprised that it was funny.
KS: That’s a good question. I think I’d want to highlight that it was a funny and entertaining movie. You also have to be upfront about it too, right? ‘Cause I think you can tell someone it’s entertaining, but they’re probably not expecting two and a half hours. Paul Thomas Anderson’s gotten really good at the slow burn, and this to me was a slow burn, but it was funny, and you still get a little bit of that reward at the end that you get with a lot of his films.
CM: You’re right, it’s got a great ending, an emotional wrap up like Boogie Nights. Are you generally a PTA fan?
KS: Yeah, generally. Ahead of this, I re-watched The Master. My wife had not seen it, so we watched that this past weekend. I hadn’t seen this or Punch-Drunk Love.
CM: A lot of people love that movie, but I am not a fan.
Joaquin Phoenix as private investigator “Doc” Sportello.
CM: What did you think about Joaquin Phoenix?
KS: I liked Joaquin Phoenix. I think he’s done some great stuff. In The Master, his performance really stuck out to me. That was, I think, a very physical performance. Not to move away from Joaquin, but to go back to this: it’s a period piece, but it’s not obsessed with being a period piece. You feel it in the dialogue, with Manson, paranoia…
CM: The Mansonoid Conspiracy!
KS: This came out around the same time as American Hustle, which is just obsessed with being a period piece. This has none of that feel at all, which I think is great and feels very natural, very contemporary.
CM: There is a lot of subtext about the end of the sixties, and the corruption of the counterculture. Sportello is a total creature of the sixties counterculture, a hippie to the bone. He’s shocked when Shasta shows up, wearing what he calls “flatland gear.” It looks like it’s about a real estate scam, when it starts. That’s basically Chinatown, you know? Then it sort of wanders off from there. Did you feel like you could follow the plot?
KS: Yeah, reasonably so.
CM: That’s good, because I think to a lot of people, it seems like gibberish.
KS: I feel like I could capture it. Maybe I’m being overconfident. That’s definitely why I said I need to rewatch it. I got the commercialization of the counterculture, and especially the real estate part of it. I was not real clear on how we got to Adrian Prussia.
CM: That’s a big plot hole that they hang a lampshade on. The narrator Sortilége says something like “he threw himself onto the karmic wheel.” He’s the guy I haven’t checked out yet. So it’s a very loose connection. But then it turns out to be the key to the whole thing. You know, the basic film noir structure is pretty simple: The detective just goes and bounces off one person after another until he solves the crime. Or not.
Joaqin Phoenix as “Doc” Sportello and Josh Brolin as “Bigfoot” Bjornsen.
KS: There’s something with Paul Thomas Anderson and male friendships, and it’s in this movie, too. There’s something kind of fun and sweet about it. Sportello and Bigfoot have these dynamics that are established in our society all around us. You’ve got Doc, the hippie, and Bigfoot this sort-of Republican, super buttoned-up man. Yet they’re able to understand each other on a deeper level than just sort of, “Hey, we’re both detectives.” There’s something very sweet about that connection.
CM: Turns out when Sportello finds out that Adrian Prussia killed Bigfoot’s partner for the Golden Fang, he’s like, “Oh my God! I understand this guy now!” He has empathy for him, you know? Then there’s Benicio del Toro, the lawyer, which is another conflicted male friendship. “Clients pay me, Doc. Clients pay me.”
Benicio del Toro and Joaquin Phoenix.
Lemme ask you: Sortilége, the narrator. Do you think she’s a real person?
KS: I mean, no. It’s interesting. He’s using Joanna Newsome, who’s got probably the most otherworldly voice I could imagine, and using her for this character that kind of just floats in and out, and sometimes she doesn’t even have a body. Until you asked the question, I didn’t think about it, though.
CM: Seriously, I had watched it a couple of times until I realized, she’s not actually a person, she’s just in his mind.
KS: Wait, there’s a scene when they’re in the car together, towards the beginning, where she just kind of fades away.
CM: You see them in the car, then the angle reverses, and she’s gone. She’s his internal monologue. And she also fills that film noir voiceover role. You know, “That’s me, floating dead in the pool …”
Joanna Newsome as Sortilége, Phoenix, and Katherine Waterson as Shasta
KS: It’s a very film-y movie without being overly film-y. I think of Boogie Nights, where the opening scene has a very Spielberg feel, like he’s like paying direct homage. He doesn’t do that here. It feels natural.
CM: The cinematography is incredible.
KS: Yeah, all the blues and yellows. I keep thinking of that opening and closing. It’s not quite the closing shot, but the ocean in between those two buildings, it’s a beautiful, beautiful start to a movie. It’s a really gorgeous, gorgeous film. And I heard y’all kind of react to it, at the end when he’s driving with Shasta, and the lights are coming in, right in his eyes. It’s got this sort of dream-like light. It’s almost like they’re floating in the air.
CM: It’s full of these weird dualities, and fascists lurking in the background, like the Jewish builder who hangs around with Nazis. And the bit, “Is that a swastika?” “No, that’s a Hindu symbol of luck.” Nah, it’s a swastika tattooed on that guy’s face!
KS: It goes back to what I was saying about Sportello and Bigfoot — the more liberal hippie Sportello and the very conservative, super buttoned-up cop who were able to get along.
CM: And the Black Panther who comes in and tries to hire Sportello to find out who killed his Aryan Brotherhood friend.
Joaquin Phoenix and Michael K. Williams
KS: And rest and peace to Michael K. Williams. I did not know he was in this movie. He just passed away.
CM: I didn’t realize that was him! I mean, seriously, the cast is amazing.
KS: Oh yeah. Maya Rudolph is in like, what, two scenes maybe? She’s just the receptionist!
Maya Rudolph’s (center) cameo in Inherent Vice.
CM: One of the things I like about film noir, and you see it in this movie, too, is that everybody’s playing a game against everybody else, and everybody’s a rational player. Everybody’s looking two or three moves ahead, which allows the dialogue to be very subtle because everybody’s anticipating each other’s moves. That’s one of the things that appeals to me about noir. Everybody’s smart and savvy. But real life is not like that at all. People are stupid. If you expect rational actors, it’ll mess you up. I’m very distrustful of people.
KS: And that’s on steroids in this with all the paranoia that he’s already feeling from the pot.
Coy’s (Owen Wilson) surf band’s pizza party becomes The Last Supper.
CM: Sportello doesn’t actually solve anything! He gives the dope back to the Fang and Shasta just comes back on her own.
KS: He helps out Coy, which seems like the most insignificant of all the connections that are made. And you’re like, “Wait, so the end prize is that he gets to go home to his wife and kids? Like, okay, great.”
CM: Maybe that’s what’s challenging about it: This movie’s not holding your hand. It presents all the information, but you gotta put the work in. And to bring us back around to Indie Memphis, maybe that’s what you want out of festival movies. It’s not just passive viewing. Right?
KS: No, absolutely not. I think one of the things that we find really important is that the festival is finding films that do a good job at that in such an entertaining way — this is a really good example — and then making sure that there is a conversation, because films like this deserve a conversation like we’re having here. Whether that be from our local filmmakers, whether that be from national films, they all deserve a really thoughtful conversation. That’s what the festival is really all about — being able to celebrate creative and artistic endeavor and give it the honor that the work deserves through thoughtful conversation and celebrating the artist.
I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at the Academy Awards.
Oscar night is a big deal in the Hocking-McCoy household. We clear off the coffee table and put out a big spread of sushi. We parse each acceptance speech down to the syllable level. We print out ballots and compete to see who gets the most categories right. The prize for the winner is bragging rights for the year.
I can’t remember the last time I held bragging rights. Have I ever bested Commercial Appeal writer John Beifuss in his annual “Beat Beifuss” competition? I got close once.
You’d think that someone who reads about, watches, and occasionally makes movies for a living would be better at predicting Oscar winners. But, it turns out, my tastes rarely match the outcome of the Oscar voters’ poll. I’ve tried voting strategically, making my choices based on the conventional wisdom in the trades and among critics with bigger circulation than me. I’ve also tried voting my conscience, picking the ones I thought should win and letting the chips fall where they may. Neither method seems to work.
This is, of course, very similar to the choice voters face in the Democratic primaries. Do you vote your conscience or do you vote for the candidate you think has the best chance to beat Trump? Let my experience be a lesson to you. You simply don’t have enough information to vote strategically, so use the system the way it was designed to be used and just vote for the candidate you think will do the best job.
My Oscar ineptitude is one of the reasons I usually don’t do a preview pick-’em column. But the voices of my writing teachers are in my head saying, “People love it when you make yourself vulnerable.” So here goes: my picks for the 2020 Academy Awards.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is the only truly great part of that film, but Adam Driver’s clueless art-dad Charlie in Marriage Story is the year’s best naturalistic performance. I’m going with Driver.
Supporting Actor: Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers better than anyone else could have in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Brad Pitt elevates Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood to greatness. Plus, his T-shirt clearly says “CHAMPION.” Pitt is it.
Little Women could clean up in multiple categories.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: This is the hardest category for me. Cynthia Erivo’s Harriet Tubman is close to perfect. Scarlett Johansson is Adam Driver’s equal in Marriage Story. I’m going with Saoirse Ronan as Jo in Little Women.
Best Supporting Actress is a little easier. It’s down to Laura Dern as a divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and Florence Pugh as Amy in Little Women. I think Pugh nudges Dern.
Missing Link
Best Animated Feature: I desperately want Missing Link to win. The stop-motion wizards at Laika have been killing it for a decade, and this is their year for recognition!
For Cinematography, it’s Roger Deakins in a walk. 1917 is a next-level achievement. This is the only Oscar that film deserves.
For Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran for Little Women barely beats Arianne Phillips for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Excellent work by both women.
Best Documentary Feature is Honeyland, an environmental fable masquerading as a character study. Highly recommended.
Any other year, Achievement in Film Editing would be Thelma Schoonmaker’s for the taking, but The Irishman is more than three hours long. Jinmo Yang’s work on Parasite should carry the day.
Honeyland makes a strong case for Best International Feature, but I’ve got to go with Parasite.
I’m going to take a pass on makeup because I haven’t seen two of the nominees. Best Original Song is “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin from the underrated Rocketman. Original Score should and probably will go to John Williams for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so he can retire a legend. Go ahead and give SkywalkerBest Visual Effects, too. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood‘s 1969 mixtape should take home the two sound awards, as well as Production Design.
Greta Gerwig’s tear-up-the-floorboards reimagining of Little Women deserves the Adapted Screenplay statue. I’m giving the Original Screenplay to Knives Out … probably because I’m giving everything else to Parasite.
Best Director goes to Bong Joon Ho. I was willing to give it to Quentin Tarantino, but then I found out that the Parasite house was a set with CGI background, and I was shook. Masterful execution is what this category is all about.
Best Picture has to be Parasite. This was a very good year for movies. Little Women, Marriage Story, and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are all worthy films. But Parasite captures the spirit of 2019, and it deserves the biggest prize of all.
Hollywood legend has it that during the heyday of the studio system there was a sign over the water fountain in the Warner Brothers writers building that read: “What does the bad guy want?”
Writing for the hero is easy — or at least it used to be. Superman stands up for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Wonder Woman watches over the weak and innocent. Batman protects Gotham City from evil weirdos in costumes.
Writing for villains is harder. The worst kinds of villains are the ones who are simply there to serve as a punching bag for the hero. They may look menacing and throw the occasional one-liner, but their goals are nonsensical and their psychology nonexistent.
Send in the clown! Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker.
Our recent comic book film obsession has brought a parade of idiotic villains. There is no worse offender than Thanos, the big bad guy from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He spent upwards of 10 movies trying to assemble a magical artifact that would allow him to bend reality to his will in order to stop what he saw as an out-of-control population explosion. Never mind that the universe is a brain-blastingly big place, chock-full of resources easily available to a civilization that drives spaceships like they were Bird scooters. If you can create and destroy like a god, why not snap your fingers and make enough food for everyone?
Which brings us to Joker. The Clown Prince of Crime’s motivations have historically been pretty thin, falling squarely in the “provide a punching bag for the hero” category throughout much of the character’s 80-year history. Frankly, this wasn’t much of a problem in the classic comics. But now, with Warner Brothers’ entire billion-dollar film operation resting on making Batman v. Superman: Our Moms Are Named Martha as gritty and realistic as possible, the Joker needs a Lawrence of Arabia-level character study.
Where did the Joker come from? What’s up with the clown schtick? Is his mom named Martha? All these questions and more are answered definitively by director Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix, and it only takes two ponderous hours.
Spoiler alert: His mom is named Penny Fleck. Her son Arthur (Phoenix) takes care of her in a kitsch-filled apartment in a 1981 Gotham that bears a startling resemblance to the decayed New York of Taxi Driver. In that classic, writer Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese, and actor Robert De Niro asked, “What turns an ordinary man into a political assassin?” (“He wants to impress Jodie Foster” turned out to be a startlingly accurate motivation.)
De Niro is here, seemingly to add gravitas to the movie that asks, “Why does a guy dress like a clown to get his ass kicked by a guy who dresses like a bat?” He plays Murray Franklin, a talk-show host who delivers his monologue in front of a Johnny Carson-like rainbow curtain, and who inadvertently gives the Joker his name while mocking Arthur’s attempts at stand-up comedy in front of millions of viewers. Needless to say, this does wonders for our anti-hero’s mental stability.
To be fair, Arthur has apparently been a punching bag all his life. In the movie’s crushingly depressing first hour, he is beaten up twice by the roving gangs of thugs who apparently make up the population of Gotham — at least the ones who are not obscenely rich and named Wayne. Phoenix is an incredibly gifted actor, and his performance here is scarily committed. But the most realistic performance in Joker is by Brett Cullen who portrays Thomas Wayne, doomed father of the eventual Batman, as a condescending jerk.
The most memorable parts of the movie emerge from its lead’s bottomless pool of talent. Phoenix has covered this territory before as the mentally scarred veteran who falls for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s proto-Scientology cult in The Master. But without someone of Hoffman’s caliber to play off of, Phoenix is left to spin his wheels. It’s a tremendous expenditure of energy that goes nowhere. Joker feels completely unnecessary. We’ve seen two onscreen origin stories of the Joker. The first was in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, and it took about five minutes to set up Jack Nicholson’s Joker as an ambitious gangster driven to megalomaniacal insanity after being dipped in toxic chemicals. The second, and more chilling, was Heath Ledger’s conflicting recounting of multiple origin stories in Dark Knight, which really tells you everything about the character you need to know: He’s a nihilist, and he’s nuts.
Not to spoil the party, but that’s where we’re at when we finish Joker, too. It just takes two grinding, Batman-less hours to get there. Joker is by far the most depressing comic book movie ever made. On the one hand, it’s kind of amazing that all you had to do to gross $234 million was slap a brand name on a bland remake of The King of Comedy. But on the other hand, Joker is just downright unpleasant to sit through. But I guess we’ll reconvene here in a few years for the inevitable, grim-dark Poison Ivy movie.
There’s an old saying that the difference between acting for the stage and the screen is that stage acting is about acting, but film acting is more about being. The intimacy of the camera exaggerates every nuance on an actor’s face, so emotions that seem natural on stage come across as grotesque and fake on screen.
There are few better be-ers in the business than Joaquin Phoenix, and You Were Never Really Here finds him be-ing all over the place. Phoenix plays a demobbed Iraq veteran named Joe who has been reduced to a shell of his former self by PTSD. Director Lynne Ramsay cannily introduces us to his tortured point of view in a long opening sequence where we see visual fragments of the aftermath of something horrific that recently happened in a dingy hotel room in Cincinnati. Joe, the battle-scarred soldier, is officially a civilian again, but he is still a man of violence and a consummate professional. Officially, he lives in New York caring for his octogenarian mother, portrayed with a charming playfulness by Judith Roberts. But his bloody work makes him a frequent traveler who maintains airtight operational security. He’s able to breeze into town, commit multiple murders, and evaporate like a cloud.
Joaquin Phoenix masters the thousand-yard stare in Lynne Ramsay’s new film.
Ramsay’s film, which was lauded at Cannes 2017 and picked up by Amazon Studios, has been compared to Taxi Driver. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of Travis Bickle in Joe. He moves easily through the underground of a New York that is teeming with humanity, but his extreme alienation has begun to wear on his sanity. Joe pops pills with abandon, but they do little to keep the vivid flashbacks at bay.
I think a more apt comparison would be to Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional. Joe’s work is dirty, but the people he’s whacking on the head with his preferred weapon, the ball-peen hammer, mostly deserve what’s coming to them. Joe’s current specialty is finding missing girls believed to be in the clutches of human traffickers, rescuing them, and dispatching the kidnapers with extreme prejudice. He deals in cash, cutouts, and dead drops, and if the client requests “make it hurt,” all the better.
Like Léon, this detached professional finds himself in a situation where he’s suddenly responsible for the well being of a young girl. Nina Votto (Ekaterina Samsonov) is the runaway daughter of a New York State Senator (Alex Manette) who has been imprisoned in a luxury brownstone. Leon finds her easily and, in a brilliant sequence told mostly by security camera footage, cleans out the nest of sex slavers in a particularly brutal manner. But then things go badly awry. Nina’s captors were much better connected than anyone Joe has ever taken on before, and Joe’s little world comes crashing down on him, along with what is left of his psyche.
Ramsay’s work is as chilling as it is technically flawless. She’s an avid practitioner of the Kubrick Stare — Phoenix seems to stay blank and immobile for an uncomfortably long time before springing into ultraviolence. She and cinematographer Thomas Townsend get a lot of mileage out of symmetrical shots contrasting Joe’s increasingly disheveled and bloody presence and the domestic banality of Brooklyn and New Jersey. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood composed the floaty score, but the soundtrack makes great use of New York’s terrible plague of soft rock radio, both for creepy counter-scoring and to create a sense of place.
You Were Never Really Here seems like a rebuke to the John Wicks of the world. The Keanu Reeves character is a dapper professional killer with a supernaturally competent supporting cast based out of a chain of luxury hotels. Joe, on the other hand, takes his payoffs in brown manila envelopes hidden in the backrooms of bodegas. John Wick stages mass murder as a kind of hyper-violent ballet. Director Ramsay is more concerned with the aftermath of violence. Her elliptical editing reveals the effects — bloody hammers, personal effects gathered for clandestine disposal — without glamorizing the cause. And while Wick is portrayed as a kind of benevolent, detached angel of death, Joe is haunted by the horrors he has seen and caused. Ramsay’s version of the professional may not be as commercial as John Wick’s, but it is no less slick — and much more truthful.
