JOKER (US/Canada - 2019) Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Shea Whigham, Bill Camp, Marc Maron, Brian Tyree Henry, Glenn Fleshler, Leigh Gill, Josh Pais, Rocco Luna, April Grace, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Douglas Hodge, Dante Pereira-Olson, Sharon Washington, Chris Redd, Hannah Gross. (R, 121 mins) After a month of thinkpieces and endless debate, praise, hand-wringing, and outrage following its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, the revisionist origin story JOKER is, at this point, pretty much a scorching hot take that happens to be accompanied by the incidental release of a movie. Certain to provoke divisive reactions and possibly more, the film has admirable aspirations of being a loving homage to the gritty NYC of old, particularly two Martin Scorsese classics in 1976's TAXI DRIVER and 1983's THE KING OF COMEDY. It gets it right for a while, starting with the old-school 1970s Warner Bros. logo and various pop culture indicators (BLOW OUT and ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE on a theater marquee, and posters for WOLFEN, EXCALIBUR, ARTHUR, and DRAGONSLAYER) placing the setting in 1981 and, for the most part, successfully nailing the period detail. While partially indebted to the classic 1988 Alan Moore/Brian Bolland graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, JOKER's title character as a cackling, chain-smoking amalgam of TAXI DRIVER's Travis Bickle and THE KING OF COMEDY's Rupert Pupkin, with a bit of DEATH WISH's Paul Kersey and the infamous 1984 Bernhard Goetz NYC subway shooting, an incident reminiscent of a sequence in DEATH WISH a decade earlier.
All that aside, the whole show here is Joaquin Phoenix as the eventual title character, a mentally-disturbed clown-for-hire named Arthur Fleck, who lives in a rundown Gotham tenement with his gravely ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy) and is generally treated like a punching bag by the entire world. On seven different medications that aren't helping, and often making others uncomfortable with a neurological, Tourette's-like condition that causes screeching laughter at inappropriate moments, Arthur is doomed to be a loner ("God's lonely man," as Travis Bickle might say), but he has visions of getting organizized and being a stand-up comedian ("Don't you have to be funny for that?" his mother asks). But bad luck follows Arthur like a fly on shit: he's rolled by a group of teens who viciously beat him and steal a sign he was waving on a job, and his boss threatens to take the cost of the sign out of his paycheck; he's given a gun by co-worker Randall (Glenn Fleshler), only to have it fall out of his pants while entertaining some kids in a children's hospital, after which Randall throws him under the bus and gets him fired; and that same day, he's taunted again on the way home by three Wall Street douchebags who start beating him, causing Arthur to snap, shooting and killing all three of them in an act of self-defense that turns into cold-blooded murder. All the while, a class war is brewing in the garbage-strewn streets of Gotham, with the city's downtrodden growing tired of the gutting of social services ("How do I get my medication?" Arthur asks his social worker when she says her department's funding has been cut and she's being let go) and of being overlooked by the city's wealthy movers and shakers, represented by billionaire Wayne Enterprises CEO Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), who's just announced a mayoral run because he's "the only one" who can fix Gotham.
Like everything in JOKER, the "I alone can fix it" Donald Trump comparisons aren't subtle, but what happens in Gotham is tantamount to a revolution when word gets out that a guy in a clown costume killed three rich assholes on the subway. Soon, protesters flood the streets dressed as clowns, intent on taking the city back by any means necessary. Though his identity remains a mystery, Arthur has started a movement, and finally, people are starting to notice him. That includes attractive, single mom neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz), who lives down the hall, as well as a leaked videotape of a nervous, cackling Arthur bombing at Gotham comedy club open-mic night, with the humiliating footage making its way to TV courtesy of LIVE WITH MURRAY FRANKLIN, a late-night talk show hosted by Arthur's Johnny Carson-like idol and fantasy father figure Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro, looking embalmed). De Niro's presence is the most overt example of the Scorsese worship on the part of director/co-writer Todd Phillips (the HANGOVER trilogy), and while it's obvious Phillips loves vintage Scorsese movies and is trying to stretch beyond his bro comedy filmography that also includes ROAD TRIP and OLD SCHOOL, he doesn't quite have the knack of pulling one off himself. JOKER works very well for a while, but after about Phoenix's 26th or 27th laughing fit with accompanying dancing and pirouetting, it starts to become clear that the story is secondary to indulging the star's extreme Method tendencies. Make no mistake, an emaciated Phoenix gives this everything, but it grows tiresome no matter how remarkable it is at times, and starts to resemble a hammy version of his ultimately stronger performances in films like THE MASTER and YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE.
While it gets off to a good start as the most transgressive, depressing, and unrelentingly bleak comic book movie ever made, it's a safe bet that, despite the incessant media coverage, a lot of mainstream multiplexers are still bound to go into this expecting a Batman movie and are seriously going to hate it (you could also envision it as a comic book movie made by Abel Ferrara at his KING OF NEW YORK/BAD LIEUTENANT pinnacle). Augmented by a suffocatingly downbeat Hildur Guonadottir score that's beyond oppressive, JOKER begins to work at cross purposes in the markedly inferior final act. Part of this stems from the disastrous way that Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (8 MILE, THE FIGHTER) handle Beetz's character, but also in the way the messaging becomes so heavy-handed once Arthur--by now a deranged murderer going around in full Joker makeup--finally appears as a guest on Murray Franklin's show, where he gives a rambling speech that sounds like a love letter to be quoted as a enraged rallying cry by self-pitying incels everywhere.
THE KING OF COMEDY did a brilliant job of conveying reality's blurred lines with the delusions of the hapless Rupert Pupkin, but Phillips--again, no Marty Scorsese and probably not the right director for this--either lacks the finesse to communicate that or doesn't trust the audience to figure it out, perhaps a combination of the two, though there's certainly an argument to be made that the entire film is just a figment of Arthur Fleck's imagination. The casting of De Niro is a missed opportunity, and not just because of his limited screen time. While Scorsese superfans and hardcore movie nerds will get some amusement out of seeing the one-time unstoppable dreamer Pupkin aged into Jerry Lewis' cynical Jerry Langford, De Niro seems indifferent to the material, much the way he did in his stumbling, cue-card-flubbing appearances as Robert Mueller on the last couple seasons of SNL. While functioning as a standalone film, JOKER does tie into the Batman mythos by the end and is an interesting major-studio experiment that's worth seeing once. But barring any real-life tragedy that keeps it in the news, the buzz on this is likely to quiet down quickly once initial curiosity about Phoenix's performance is satiated (Heath Ledger's DARK KNIGHT Joker still retains the crown) and word of mouth gets around.
VICE (US - 2018) Written and directed by Adam McKay. Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Jesse Plemons, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Fay Masterson, John Hillner, Paul Yoo, Joseph Beck, Tony Graham. (R, 132 mins) ANCHORMAN director and Will Ferrell BFF Adam McKay took the leap to "serious filmmaker" with 2015's THE BIG SHORT, an angry and irreverent autopsy of the housing market collapse. He takes the same approach and nets less consistent results with the Dick Cheney biopic VICE, which covers the life of George W. Bush's vice president from his days as a hard-drinking college dropout and all-around fuck-up in 1963, through the events of 9/11 to his heart transplant in 2012. Regardless of how one feels about Cheney and where you stand politically, the one thing everyone can agree on in these more-divisive-than-ever times is that Christian Bale completely disappears onscreen and all you see is Dick Cheney. Sporting Oscar-worthy makeup and an extra 45-50 lbs, the Oscar-winning actor, known for his startling transformations in past films like THE MACHINIST, THE FIGHTER, and AMERICAN HUSTLE, absolutely becomes Cheney. Bale carries VICE on his shoulders, and it's a good thing he does, because without the level of obsessive, Day-Lewisian dedication in his performance/metamorphosis, the film's shortcomings and inconsistencies would be a lot more glaring than they already are.
Counting Ferrell and Brad Pitt among its producers, VICE is entertaining, but McKay too often succumbs to Michael Moore agitprop with all the subtlety of a jackhammer or, perhaps, Ron Burgundy. Tonally, it's all over the place, with the grim seriousness of 9/11 juxtaposed with the kind of meta jokes that wouldn't have been out of place on something like MR. SHOW or FUNNY OR DIE (like a focus group stopping the movie to address its liberal bias). There's a ruthless, Lady Macbeth quality to Lynne Cheney, played here by Amy Adams, leading to Adams and Bale playing an entire scene in emphatic, scenery-chewing Shakespearean dialogue. McKay also takes the story into a hypothetical direction about 40 minutes in, just prior to Cheney accepting an offer to be Bush's VP where he, Lynne, and their extended family live happily ever after as historical footnotes, never to be heard from again as an inspiring score cue swells and the closing credits begin rolling before abruptly resetting and bringing the film back to reality. There's a scattershot, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to VICE that's worked for McKay in the past (ANCHORMAN, THE OTHER GUYS) and has also completely backfired (ANCHORMAN 2). It splits the difference here because it is funny, but the comedy only spotlights the fact that VICE is never sure what it wants to be. Bale is diving into this and losing himself in the way he deftly captures everything about Cheney physically and psychologically, while Adams is stuck playing a one-dimensional Lynne Cheney who's defined almost exclusively by her shrewd opportunism and the Cheney image (when their daughter Mary, played by Alison Pill, comes out as gay, it's Dick who immediately embraces her and offers his support while Lynne stands there, already questioning how this affects Dick's political career). Others are doing convincing impressions that look like SNL on a good night, like Steve Carell's obnoxious and loathed-throughout-DC Donald Rumsfeld, Tyler Perry's Colin Powell, Eddie Marsan's Paul Wolfowitz, and Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush, seen here as an easygoing goofball who only seems to be in politics to earn his dad's respect.
There is a clever framing device involving an onscreen narrator (Jesse Plemons), and the story jumps back and forth through the years, chronicling Cheney's time as a protege of presidential adviser Rumsfeld in the pre-Watergate Nixon White House, and his eventual return as White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford (Bill Camp) in the 1975 "Halloween Massacre," a gig he gets after swooping in to scavenge for table scraps left by everyone tainted by the Watergate fiasco. He's also the Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush and the film glosses over his tenure as CEO of Halliburton before he's persuaded to be George W. Bush's running mate. Throughout VICE, Cheney is accurately depicted as a Machiavellian mover and shaker, fixated on finding loopholes and reinterpretations to skirt around the Constitution and the law to find ways to grant the executive branch previously untapped levels of power, secrecy, and unaccountability. He's always working behind the scenes, quietly plotting, and never drawing attention to himself, qualities that come into play when he manipulates the younger Bush into letting him take on a much more significant role in policy and day-to-day operations than VPs have historically played ("The president and I have an understanding," he says whenever someone asks him if he's overstepping his boundaries).
The film's second half focuses almost entirely on the post 9/11 era, with the the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, "enhanced interrogation," Cheney's vengeful outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and other decisions that resonate to this day (the infamous incident where Cheney shot a guy in the face is also shown, along with a reminder that the only apology that ever came from it was from the victim to Cheney), but therein lies the core problem with VICE: you're not going to leave the theater knowing anything you didn't already know going in. And to that end, it's rather shallow and superficial, and lacking the focused rage of THE BIG SHORT (the most vicious jab is aimed not at Dick Cheney, but at the apathetic and easily-distracted general public, and it comes at the very end, so stick around for that stinger that comes early in the closing credits). It's a triumph of makeup and a testament to Christian Bale's many gifts as an actor and his complete devotion to his craft. He makes efforts to show Cheney's human side and doesn't play him a cartoonish Bond villain, but a long, "no apologies" monologue near the end might make you wonder if this wouldn't have made a more insightful film if it was a one-man show like James Whitmore as Harry S. Truman in 1975's GIVE 'EM HELL, HARRY! or Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's 1984 film SECRET HONOR.
JASON BOURNE (US - 2016) Directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse. Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Ato Essandoh, Gregg Henry, Scott Shepherd, Vincenz Kiefer, Stephen Kunken. (PG-13, 123 mins) After sitting out 2012's disappointing THE BOURNE LEGACY--the TOKYO DRIFT of the BOURNE franchise--star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return for the fifth entry, JASON BOURNE (they really should've called it BOURNE AGAIN). It's been nine years since THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and the Damon-Greengrass duo basically stick to the formula, opting to not fix what isn't broken and, naturally, including a new closing credits remix of Moby's "Extreme Ways." Not participating is screenwriter Tony Gilroy, a key component to the success of the first three films who failed to find a spark when he was promoted to director in Greengrass' stead for LEGACY. Greengrass' hyper-kinetic, shaky-cam style is, for better or worse, so inextricably linked with the BOURNE franchise that it's easy to forget he wasn't involved with 2002's THE BOURNE IDENTITY and only came onboard when Doug Liman (SWINGERS, GO) wasn't invited back for 2004's THE BOURNE SUPREMACY after clashing with Universal on the first film. Gilroy's focus on exposition and dialogue turned LEGACY into a bit of a bore, and without his presence here, Greengrass has taken over scripting duties for the first time on a BOURNE film. It's telling that he shares credit with his usual editor and first-time screenwriter Christopher Rouse, who won an Oscar for his editing work on ULTIMATUM. With that in mind, the focus is on action, with many of the more intricate details of plot, characterization and motivation left fuzzy, probably because that just isn't their chief concern. Trotting all over the globe at a breakneck pace, JASON BOURNE keeps your attention and is a definite improvement over THE BOURNE LEGACY, whose existence it completely ignores, but there's no denying that the freshness is waning and that neither Damon nor Greengrass seem as inspired this time out.
CIA operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the agency's database from Iceland, stealing damning files on the Treadstone and Blackbriar programs that turned all-American David Webb into superagent Jason Bourne (Damon). Bourne is living off the grid in Greece, picking up pocket money in brutal street fights and still coming to terms with his past. Parsons' hack is traced by ambitious cybersecurity official Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who talks new CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggier-than-ever Tommy Lee Jones) into making her point in the trackdown of Parsons, who they're sure will lead them to Bourne. Of course she does, though Parsons is killed by Dewey's covert agent "The Asset" (Vincent Cassel), which sends Bourne all through Europe trying to get to the bottom of Parsons' claim that the death of his State Dept honcho father Richard Webb (Gregg Henry in newly-shot flashbacks) in a Libya car bombing in 1999 was actually a CIA hit disguised as a terrorist attack. He forms an unholy alliance with Lee, who works closely with Dewey but seems to have her own agenda. Dewey, meanwhile, wants to keep a lid on anything related to Bourne and is preoccupied with his own secret dealings with billionaire social media tech mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), who's been paid a huge amount of money for his work in a new agency project called Ironhand, an advanced surveillance program that will track the whereabouts and actions of all users of Kalloor's Facebook-like app Deep Dream.
There's some fleeting attempts at topicality with Kalloor's parallels to Mark Zuckerberg, and one of Dewey's flunkies (Ato Essandoh) gravely intoning that Parsons' hack is "worse than Snowden," but Greengrass isn't really concerned with the confusing plot, instead keeping a relentless forward momentum as Bourne goes from one action set piece to the next. This culminates in a ridiculous but nonetheless entertaining car vs. SWAT truck chase in Las Vegas that's more CANNONBALL RUN than BOURNE. Mainly, the bulk of the action is a more propulsive-than-most travelogue of Damon briskly walking through scenic European cities and train stations while looking over his shoulder, intercut with the obligatory scenes in a CIA crisis suite filled with rows of surveillance monitors on the walls, with a steely-eyed Lee demonstrating an almost Spidey Sense of where to spot Bourne in a crowd ("Stop...back up two seconds...pause...enhance the image...it's HIM!"). In the most apparent sign of the shift in writing focus, Damon has very little dialogue here, and Vikander doesn't have much to other than look really grim and serious, her Heather Lee coming across like the least fun person on the planet (she's essentially a young version of Joan Allen's Pamela Landy). Jones relies on a lot of his stoical Sam Gerard routine, periodically barking "Find him!" and stopping just short of ordering Cassel's "The Asset" on a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the area. Damon's three previous BOURNE films were smartly-plotted thrillers with intense action sequences, while JASON BOURNE just dispenses with the notion of a story making much sense, but works as an over-the-top action movie, albeit one you've seen several times before. It's not so much a dumbing down as it is giving people what they want. To that extent, it's a good time, but certainly a step below the first three films, particularly the two Damon-Greengrass collaborations.
