Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is a clown for hire instead of a cab driver, with a similar street-level view of garbage-strewn Gotham City, sometime in the early '80s. Phillips literalizes that hazy quality in Joker, tying it to dorm-room debates over the endings of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, the Scorsese movies he emulates. That book offers a more tragic origin for the character, albeit one specifically described by the Joker as a hazy recollection with shifting details ("Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another"). Phillips has spoken of his desire to smuggle a '70s-style character study into a comic-book movie, which doesn't fully square with how he has (consciously or not) made a Joker movie with considerable resemblance to the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke. Yet it still often feels more like a composite of influences than a real original. Todd Phillips' new Joker is a vastly more focused, disciplined undertaking than something like Suicide Squad, with a committed and often mesmerizing performance from Phoenix. But the character's transformation from surly, murderous gangster to giddy, murderous crime boss doesn't have much pathos, or mystery.Įven an actor as gifted as Joaquin Phoenix struggles with this. It's a self-impression with a lot of entertainment value, and even some thematic resonance for the character, who does view his criminality as performance, after all. Nicholson gets all the best, most indelible lines in Burton's film: "Wait 'til they get a load of me" and "where does he get those wonderful toys?" are a lot more colorful than Keaton's terse "I'm Batman." It's Keaton, though, who does more interesting work in the film, while Nicholson remodels the Joker explicitly in the freewheeling, showboating image of an archetypal Jack performance - a collective caricature of Nicholsonian moments. But after a number of comic overhauls, the character was really reborn on-screen in the visage of Jack Nicholson for Tim Burton's Batman - where the legendary actor, in the tradition of Gene Hackman in the first Superman film, was actually billed above the guy playing the superhero (Michael Keaton). The Joker's white face and green hair had graced screens before 1989 Cesar Romero played the Clown Prince of Crime memorably on the campy Batman TV show in the 1960s, which included a feature-film spinoff in 1966.
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