“Joker: Folie à Deux” is now available on VOD for curiosity seekers, and the film can definitely be described as this madly ambitious curiosity. The critically reviled box-office bomb has been the brunt of many jokes these last few weeks, but one particular director is not taking the toxic bait.
Yes, you can count Quentin Tarantino as a ‘Folie à Deux’ megafan. In fact, he praises Joaquin Phoenix for giving “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie” (via The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast).
I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking. But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is.
And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie. That’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were.”
Tarantino went on to compare Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel to Mickey and Mallory, the serial-killer couple in “Natural Born Killers” — he sees it as a spiritual successor to his own film, which he penned, and Oliver Stone directed:
As much as the first one was indebted to Taxi Driver, this seems pretty f—ing indebted to Natural Born Killers, which I wrote. That’s the Natural Born Killers I would have dreamed of seeing, as the guy who created Mickey and Mallory. I loved what they did with it. I loved the direction he took. I mean, the whole movie was the fever dream of Mickey Knox.
“On top of all that, I thought it was really funny,” Tarantino said, adding that he saw it in an “almost empty IMAX theater” in Tel Aviv where he could “laugh without bothering everybody. I know I’m laughing at scenes that other people wouldn’t be laughing it.”
Tarantino went on to praise Phillips for his direction, and said the film felt like it had been directed by the Joker himself:
Todd Phillips is the Joker. The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the the jack in the box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying f— you to all of them. He’s saying f— you to the movie audience. He’s saying f— you to Hollywood. He’s saying f— you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers […] And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” came up when Bret Easton Ellis asked Tarantino which recent films he had seen in theaters. Tarantino added that he also went out to see Oz Perkins’ “Longlegs,” and hoped to catch Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ but didn’t get the chance.
UPDATE: It looks like Tarantino isn’t alone. Fellow filmmaker Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) also loves ‘Folie a Deux,’ and went on his Instagram to effuse praise towards the film:
Excuse me, but I'm perplexed. I went to see JOKER: FOLIES À DEUX in IMAX with zero expectations and with an open mind. Sorry, but I thought it was FUCKING GREAT! It was dark, original, transgressive, experimental, disturbing, blackly funny and visually stunning. Basically, I had a great time and was never bored. Jaoquin was great. Gaga was great. It was a piece of big-budget auteurist radical cinema. Not algorithm-based content (ie. shit). Maybe a brilliant and insane reinvention of the traditional musical love story was too icky for the DC faithful. Todd Phillips should be lauded for his audacity and skill. I feel pretty certain that this film will be reconsidered and reassessed at some point soon or in the near future. And I happen to know that many other of the very top filmmakers I know feel the same exact way. Just one man's opinion.
Is Burr right? Will “Digger” be the ‘Big Lebowski’ of 2026, a misunderstood bomb that finds its audience on home video? ‘Lebowski’ is hardly alone: “Blade Runner,” “The Shining” and “Fight Club” all followed the same path.