Arthur Fleck finds love as he is put on trial for his crimes in Joker: Folie À Deux. For the past two years, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been in the maximum security wing of Arkham State Hospital, subject to cruel and mocking treatment by the guards headed by Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson). While being escorted to a meeting with his defense lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), Arthur passes by a music therapy class and catches the eye of minimum security patient Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga). The two begin to fall for each other as Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) prepares to put Arthur on trial for the murders he has committed.
Joker: Folie À Deux Synopsis
Joker: Folie À Deux sees co-writer and director Todd Phillips return with a sequel to the 2019 original, winning star Joaquin Phoenix the Oscar for Best Actor. The plot of the film sees Arthur Fleck put on trial for the five murders he has committed, with Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent seeking the death penalty. Arthur’s lawyer Maryanne Stewart argues in Arthur’s defence that the mental illness caused by his abusive upbringing created an alternate personality through Joker. However, Arthur begins to fall for Lee Quinzel, who is attracted more to the mythos of Joker.
While Joker: Folie À Deux maintains the gritty 1970s time period of the original, the concept of this sequel is reimagined as a jukebox musical. As a result of Arthur being enrolled in a music therapy class at Arkham, Arthur Fleck would occasionally have fantasy sequences of him and Lee singing classic show tunes, such as Judy Garland‘s “Get Happy,” Frank Sinatra’s “For Once in My Life,” and Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” This results in a further rift between Arthur’s differentiation between fantasy and reality.
My Thoughts on Joker: Folie À Deux
Similar to another unconventional sequel, Gremlins II: The New Batch, Joker: Folie À Deux kicks off with a Looney Tunes-style cartoon starring Joker, called Me and My Shadow. This makes it a bit more apparent that Joker: Folie À Deux is directed by Todd Phillips, who is still best known for comedies such as Old School, The Hangover, and Due Date. In some ways, the unconventional nature of Joker: Folie À Deux as a sequel says a lot about how much of a fluke the original was.
Joker was never intended to be a canonical backstory of the Batman villain, instead being a “DC Elseworlds” about what if The Joker existed in Martin Scorsese‘s gritty New York of the 1970s. The success of the film, which included 11 Oscar nominations, two of which it won, was undoubtedly unexpected and even influenced a trans allegory parody film. It is evident that Todd Phillips didn’t want a follow-up to be a carbon copy of the original 2019 film.
The decision to make Joker: Folie À Deux into a jukebox musical is simultaneously the film’s biggest strength and weakness. The musical sequences are exceptionally well-produced, with them being filmed and formatted for IMAX screens. However, except for a madcap courtroom performance of Sammy Davis Jr.‘s appropriately titled “The Joker,” the musical sequences end up distracting from the plot of the film, rather than add on to it. It is also apparent that Joaquin Phoenix does not have the same vocal range as Lady Gaga, to the point that the latter purposely worsened her singing voice for the film.
My criticisms of the original Joker are valid for Joker: Folie À Deux in how the film depicts mental illness. Arthur Fleck’s defence during his trial is that he has Dissociative Identity Disorder, with the prosecution going as far as to argue that Fleck is faking being mentally ill and that his Joker persona is all a performance. Without revealing too much about how Joker: Folie À Deux ends, Todd Phillips doesn’t do much to prove the prosecution wrong.
While I don’t want to go into full spoilers about the final moments of Joker: Folie À Deux, I do have to note that it is going to polarize those who viewed these films as a true origin story for The Joker and not the Alternative Reality tale that it is. There is a famous quote made by The Joker in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “The Killing Joke” saying that he would prefer for his origin story to be multiple choice. By the end of Joker: Folie À Deux, it is apparent that the story of Arthur Fleck is just one of those choices.
