The Clown Prince of Cannes; Joker and Gotham's broken glass

Following rumors of Cannes’ 13 minute standing ovation, Joaquin Phoenix’s killer clown was plastered all over Madrid, and for good reason. One of the most established characters in comic book history, the clown prince of crime was always going to be a hard mask to fill, made even harder by the fact that this Joker would be our protagonist. Feeling like that we are meant to root for this eponymous villain is almost as insane as Arthur Fleck himself, but the stomach churning roller coast of the next two hours would cement Phoenix as the man for this impossible job. Walking into a screening of Joker, it was hard not to already feel uneasy. You walk into the cinema prepared to be forced to the edge of your seat, and so every tiny detail makes your hair stand on end.

***SPOILERS BELOW***

“I don’t know if I ever really existed.”

From the beginning, the most inane parts of Fleck’s existence are made excruciating. An empty letterbox has never felt so desperate, a city staircase so mountainous. As a watcher, you are unsure of whether a scene is ever real, as the ultimate unreliable narrator imagines his life in an eerie sequence of ups and downs. From the moment he hugs De Niro on the stage of his imagination, to the 7 shots from his 6 shot revolver, nothing quite adds up, and this psychotic imagination leads up to the first of a handful of sickening twists, his entire imagined relationship with his neighbor. The Joker delightfully claims his life has gone from tragedy to comedy, but the audience sees quite the opposite. The pitiful character we can’t help but feel sorry for transforms rapidly into the unbearable, contorting criminal. A disturbing afterthought of the film is how once becoming the Joker, Fleck stops laughing completely.

My favorite motif was how many times a glass wall blocked the Joker’s life, and how whether or not he broke through it would tell the story of the following scene. Fleck in the asylum constantly banging his head against the glass tells us about him failing to escape his own hell. However, as soon as he is fired, he shatters the phone box glass, and starts to break free. But just as he starts to reach his peak, finding the clues to his past and confidently dismissing two pursuing policeman, the hospital glass blocks his escape, and he starts to sink into depravity again. He bounces between panes of glass for the rest of the film, whenever he shatters glass he starts to soar, whenever glass blocks him he starts to plummet. Until he dons the red jacket and full makeup, finally descends the same Sisyphean staircase he has been climbing all film, being chased by the same policemen, shatters a taxi windscreen, and then bursts through a window. Two panes of glass shattered in a row, and from this point on, the world belongs to the Joker. The tiny, depressed, skin and bone clown born with the curse of laughter pushes Gotham over the edge, shattering the thin glass that was holding back the city’s apocalypse. For 70 years, the Batman has created the Joker. Now however, it was the Joker that created the Batman, the two sides of the same coin flipped on its head.

All of these stomach turning events could not have been brought to life without a man worthy of the mask. Treading the eggshell post-Heath Ledger arena into which Jared Leto crashed and burned, Phoenix brings to screen the quintessential Joker, a nobody who becomes the burning star of his own maniacal reality. Whenever he is in focus, the room shrinks around him, boxing the audience into his uncomfortable reality. Whenever he slips out of focus, his gaunt and made-up face is something ripped straight from the cover of Death of the Family. When an actor stares directly into the camera, they risk breaking the very illusion they are portraying, but Phoenix does so in such a way that he throws the Joker out from the screen and straight into the audience’s nightmares.

Todd Philips, unbelievably the same man behind the camera on The Hangover, has done very well to ensure his Joker stays well away from the rest of the last 5 years’ DC flops. Through creating a unique and macabre interpretation of the character, I would take no surprise to see this version of Joker become how the world thinks of the clown in years to come. Romero, Nicholson, and Ledger all became the Joker, and now Phoenix too has joined the circus.