Joker: Folie à Deux Torpedoes Joker’s Melodramatic Power

Vague and incoherent, put together in what seems to be a deliberately anticlimactic design, Joker: Folie à Deux is a slack, overlong bummer of a film with very little in the way of crowd-pleasing genre movie compensations for the notably sparser audiences showing up for it.

The first Todd Phillips Joker film, a violent melodrama packing a surprisingly big emotional punch, was the huge hit of 2019. It followed the narrative arc of the abject, abused, afraid, impoverished, and unfunny would-be comic and born victim Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix in an Oscar-winning performance), who finds a way to express his retaliatory rage with violent brio against a cruelly horrible society. In the sequel, writer-director Phillips pounds away at the bleak chore of returning the character to an even lower state than where he started. He’s really just miserable, abject Arthur in the end. But with musical numbers!

There are about twenty songs performed, or perhaps it just seems that way over the course of two hours and eighteen minutes. They’re sung by Phoenix, who can’t sing, and Lady Gaga, who definitely can but pretends she can’t half the time in the film. In Gotham’s grim reality, see, her Harleen “Lee” Quinzel character, a sociopath obsessed with Joker who meets Arthur as a fellow inmate in Arkham Asylum, sings in a thin, reedy voice. Whereas in the shared fantasy world of the increasingly devoted Joker ’n’ Lee couple, Lee belts out songs in Lady Gaga’s strong showbiz-trained mezzo soprano. We hear “Get Happy,” “That’s Entertainment,” “For Once in My Life,” “That’s Life,” and many other Great American Songbook faves.

Occasionally a number works pretty well. “For Once in My Life” is the best example, performed by Joker and Lee as if they were starring in a 1970s variety show like The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. They break off in the middle of the song to banter with each other in corny, half-hostile ways that…