I tend to stay away from calling a movie or performance the best of any given year, especially when there is still time to go before we reach December 31st. However, I doubt we will be graced with a better performance than Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in “Joker.” Despite all that we’ve heard about this role, I did not expect the masterful work that Phoenix does here. This performance confirms the 44-year-old actor as the best actor of his generation, and you can add it alongside his other pantheon-worthy work in “The Master,” “Two Lovers,” and “Her”.
Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a man in deep distress, living with his elderly mom in a dingy New York City apartment, while he struggles to keep his job as a commercial clown. It doesn’t help that Fleck is also consistently bullied everywhere he goes. This is after all New York City in 1981, with record crime rates and poverty, which has a co-worker giving Fleck a gun to protect himself, concerned that his eccentricities may get the wrong attention. Fleck has a condition where he sometimes can’t stop laughing; it’s a nervous tick, but it gets him into trouble everywhere he goes, until he’s had enough and uses the .44 that was given to him to take matters into his own hands.
This DC origin story is not a comic book movie at all. Yes, there’s Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father, campaigning to be mayor by promising a cleanup of the city, but the film can easily be viewed as a standalone character-driven story reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.” No coincidence then that Scorsese is executive producing “Joker” and that the star of both those classics, Robert De Niro, plays a game show host who tries to use Fleck for laughs on live television.
The parallels to today’s world are there — societal alienation and short-term medical treatment have never felt more current than they do today. Fleck’s situation could attest to 21st century anxieties, as he’s on seven different medications for his declining mental health, but New York’s cutting down of mental health services causes him lose the social counsellor who would prescribe the meds for him. Fleck’s descent into madness is immaculately horrifying because it feels all too real and anchored up by present-day realities and tensions.
Although “Joker,” directed with passionate fury by Todd Phillips, is an entirely gripping movie, one cannot imagine it being as gripping without Phoenix’s performance, because this is, in essence, a character-driven story. Having just won the Golden Lion at Venice, and the acting award for Phoenix, the film comes out at a time when the country feels at a crossroads between civility and chaos. It’s understandable that many critics are calling the film dangerous in its, supposed, call to arms and revolution (Fleck starts a movement when he kills three wall-street idiots pushing him around), but the fact that this movie is actually sparking panic in people must mean that it has hit a societal nerve, which renders it an indelible statement of current-day socio-political anxieties. [A-/B+]