Original title: Joker · Todd Phillips · USA · 2019 · Script: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver · Performers: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Frances Conroy.
1.Background. To all good (and old) comics fan, You cannot help but be surprised by the sudden interest that the film industry has shown in recent times in this medium of expression and, especially, for the superhero sub-genre. Why was this explosion of productions dedicated to stories that I had already read thirty years ago??, he was wondering. And most important of all, What did cinema have to contribute to what has already been told for decades in the cartoons?? But, more than anything, perhaps the most difficult question was this: Would cinema be capable, in its aspect as a form of mass consumption, to assume the transformation that the genre itself had already undergone during the decade of the 80 from the last century? In those years, with the publication of works such as Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, or the famous The Dark Night Returns by Frank Miller, superhero comics were never going to be the same. With these (and many others) fundamental works, The vignettes took an aesthetic and plot leap to address more “serious” issues., we could say, addressing the complexities of the human soul and its projection in the social and political reality of its time. The characters would be more complex from now on., His adventures would become somewhat more convoluted, philosophically speaking, that the mere confrontation between good and evil that had been the previous usual practice. But, except for some modest attempt, The contemporary film industry did not seem very interested in these mutations., and rather had chosen to cling to the genre as pure light entertainment for teenagers, which, given today's technical possibilities, it was still a disappointment. For this chronicler, Not even the adaptation of Christopher Nolan's Batman came close to those budgets. The effort to reform Batman's kinetic aesthetic was appreciated, but the stories were very far from some expectations. until it arrived Joker.
2. The argument. Briefly and without giving too much away. Arthur Fleck is a man who lives in a small apartment in a rundown neighborhood of Gotham City.. To earn a living and following his vocation as a comedian, Arthur works as a clown for a company that offers its services at all types of events.: birthday parties, to cheer up sick children in a hospital, as a man advertisement for a store, etc. He doesn't make much money, just enough to fill the refrigerator and pay the rent on the run-down apartment he shares with his elderly, sick mother., the one he cares for. Despite his precarious vital and economic status, His mother always taught Arthur that he had to smile in the face of any problem.. A positive attitude was, So, the surest path to success, not only at work, but in his relationship with others. But the truth is that life does nothing but hit Arthur, both physically and emotionally. He is beaten by a gang of young people in the street, he is hit by the small betrayals of his boss and his co-workers and, above all, He is hit by a political and social system that abandons him economically, condemning him to marginality., but also emotionally, leaving it in the hands of officials who have few tools (if they really care) to treat your condition, because Arthur suffers from a strange dysfunction that forces him to laugh uncontrollably in situations of extreme tension. Everyone hits Arthur... Until he gets fed up.
3. An impeccable reconstruction job. The first thing to highlight about this Joker directed by filmmaker Todd Phillips, It is the care with which he and his team (both in the script, as in the rest of the facets of production) They have tried to update the figure of a character as iconic as the crazy man who gives his name to this work.. If something has characterized this latest batch of super-heroic productions, it was the attempt to redesign the past of the characters they addressed., either because they considered that what was already written in the cartoons might not interest contemporary audiences., good for commercial reasons, to rewrite the story from the beginning and thus create a new world in which the viewer, unfamiliar with the genre, would not be conditioned by any previous reference.. But the truth is that most of these reinventions, both in his character, as in the series of events that supported its genesis, either they did not contribute anything or they were, at least, much less original than its predecessor on paper. In this point, the success of Todd Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver is twofold. Relying on the now legendary rewriting of the character carried out by the aforementioned Alan Moore in The killing joke, the creative couple Phillips/Silver not only make an impeccable psychological recreation of the character (We will talk about this in the next point), but they manage to drag it onto the screen with all its potential and, we dare to say it, They push her a little further. But what is most admirable about this work is how Phillips and his creative team have achieved what is undoubtedly most difficult in these adaptations.: bring all the imagery of the Joker's world to moving images (y, by extension, in Batman) and make it credible and sustainable for the modern viewer. Talking about all this would take us many pages., We will only say that Phillips and company have managed to transfer complex elements such as the character's hysterical laughter to the room in a particularly realistic way., his whitish face and his disproportionate smile, and even the famous purple suit and green hair that are so characteristic and that here appear in a truly remarkable styling job.. This stylization work will take you to other areas, as we will see.
4. Joaquin Phoenix, Yeah. Without a doubt one of the fundamental pieces of this function. Your work is overwhelming, a true delight for the senses. And here we are not only referring to his impressive gestural capacity or his striking physical transformation until he leaves his usual strong body made of pure bone and nerve.. Yeah, Every grimace in his performance is a gift for that viewer who likes to pay attention to the smallest things when given the opportunity.. Every muscle, every gesture, Every expression on his face and body speaks to us and tells us something about his character., loading each shot of this film with details in a plastic exercise that never seems to end. Even the last shot of the last sequence has Phoenix something to offer us that we had not seen until then. Para Phillips, the actor's body becomes, So, in pure sourdough, clay that, in tune with the camera and the rest of the elements of the staging, They are pure aesthetic delight. But all this gestural work is not at the service of the mere whim of a simply histrionic performance., as one might have imagined from some advances, but in the intimate psychological construction of a character whose torment we feel in each of the images of this film. Plano a plano, sequence to sequence, we can feel the enormous physical and psychological work, the extraordinary struggle that Phoenix and Phillips' Joker has with himself to resist giving in and, at the same time, the intimate desire to break the shell that imprisons your true self, the deep affliction of a man who goes out of his way not to fall into temptation and behave according to the rules, although, Ay, These rules are nothing more than the excuse that condemns him to submit to a system that sees him as a simple puppet. And Arthur/Joker can't take it anymore. How long will it last like this, humiliated, seen, lost? But the most incredible thing about Phoenix's Joker is that, even though all this is perfectly clear, It still keeps a kind of mystery inside., a secret that he only reserves for himself, ultimate motivation for their actions, that the viewer perceives and is not able to fully unravel. That mystery is the very essence of the Joker, its marrow. Yeah, Joaquin Phoenix “es”, at last, the joker. Pure adrenaline.
5. The language of comics in cinema. But where cinema has encountered the greatest difficulties has always been in how to adapt the language of the cartoons to the screen.. From the clumsy approaches of Watchemen they Zack Snyder, going through the more or less successful efforts of more outstanding works such as that of Christopher Nolan and his Batman saga, to the latest productions from the Marvel factory, The biggest problem was how to bring the sequenced grammar of comics to moving images by making, at once, something different and own. From everything seen so far (and I haven't seen it all, naturally; in fact, I feel very disconnected from most of these proposals.), only the unjustly reviled Superman returns de Bryan Singer (Isn't your Superman a perfect stylistic adaptation of the Myracleman by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch y John Totleben?) and he Captain America: winter soldier by Joe Russo, They seemed to have offered something interesting. We could say that the greatest achievement of many of these productions has been to adopt the language of conventional cinema of the action and fantasy genre., and little more. Con Joker a before and after is marked. Phillips' move is downright smart. Not that it offers anything new., but he knows how to play well with what he has. Phillips himself gave the aforementioned clues to Taxi driver of Martin Scorsese as one of his aesthetic references on which he has relied to design this production. And of course, there it is; from the character's own physical and psychological composition (The tribute is more than evident in many sequences), even many of its ornamental references. The use of shadows, The gloomy setting of the city or the very calculated use of the human figure are some of the elements that stand out more than obviously on the screen.. Joker emulates Scorsese's Travis Bickle in many ways, but he does it by creating, in turn, your own imagery, your own myth. But Phillips also uses the styling of advertising and the logic of the music video as good formal allies., which allows you to play stylized compositions that, this time yes, they remember, without trying to imitate her, to the careful composition of the vignettes, but without abandoning the elements of the narrative construction of cinema. And perhaps the most satisfying thing for every good comic fan (and I believe that the uninitiated, will not be able to appreciate its full value): that despite that effort (accomplished) for presenting this story to us within supposedly realistic parameters, by not giving up all the elements of the original story (allusions to Gotham, the presence of Thomas Wayne and his son Bruce, the future batman), he Joker of Phillips continues to operate in those coordinates of strangeness, of pure fantasy with which the best narratives of the genre play. With these tools, Phillips gives us a piece that is pure dramatic and physical drive. There is tension in every tracking shot, in each shot cut within each moment of history, in every transition to every new scenario, in a sum and remains inexhaustible to sustain all the time the challenge that his character and main actor sets before him.. Now that we see it, no wonder, since Phillips had already shown signs of his mastery of these tools in previous productions, as is the case of The Hangover, a tape full of good ideas that, like here, it was pure energy.
6. The controversy. But, what does this tell us about Joker? Thus we arrive at the Gordian knot of the matter.. And the criticism that this film has received has never ceased to surprise the director himself and many specialists. (many times prior to viewing it based on the promotional trailer) for his resort to violence that, for certain social commentators (the censors), It seems more like an incitement than a critical analysis or merely aesthetic game.. I believe these comments are unwarranted or deliberately misrepresent the intentions of this work.. In any case, the most striking thing is that, more than forty years after Taxi driver, let's be in the same trivial disputes of yesteryear. Something's not right. Violence is in the cinema, Yeah, and sometimes for free, when not caricatured (which I don't know to what extent is necessarily bad). But in the case of both Phillips and Scorsese it is absurd to reproach them for this, because its violence is the result of the violence that exists in reality, the one off screen. Both characters have, in fact, something in common. If Scorsese's Travis was a man psychologically disturbed by a world in decline that marginalized him at the bottom of the social scale and only remembered him when the elections arrived, something similar happens here. As we have mentioned before, Arthur is, in certain aspects, a reflection of our time. smile, a society tells you that, on the other hand, He treats it like authentic spoils.. That smile is nothing more than a demand to be submitted. be kind, don't cause any problems and everything will be fine for you, they tell him. As Arthur transforms into Joker, The city will explode in a popular revolt that is a mirror of those same miseries.. Revolt against the system, revolt against the political class, revolt against the narcotic and cynical spectacle of television... And yes, Joker It is a movie in which there is violence, but its burden is not in it, precisely. And this is when the really controversial thing comes because perhaps the most relevant thing about this case is that, from a certain point of view, Joker can be understood as an open call to revolution. And from here on, let each one make up as best he can.. Your call may only be symbolic, a mere hint at rebellion, not exactly aggressive, but it has pure poison.
7. And now, to finish. Without a doubt the Joker by Todd Phillips is one of the best that this year's billboard has given us, which is already heading towards its outcome. But the most interesting of all is not the brilliant resolution of the proposal.. Perhaps most relevant is that Phillips demonstrates that, given the obvious box office success that it is going to achieve around the world, you can make entertaining films with powerful and well-constructed stories, and in that this work is an example to follow. You don't have to treat the viewer like a diaper child to make some money. It is not incompatible. Will the big producers take note of the experiment?? They do not lack material. They just need to read good comics. Yes indeed, with respect. It is not a request... It is a demand. GERARDO LEON
