Joker: Folie à Deux Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga Sing a Duet That's Way Out of Tune

There’s a famous old Bee Gees hit that begins: “I started a joke which started the whole world crying.” This is as good a sentiment as any to describe the new Joker sequel, unpromisingly subtitled Folie à Deux.

Turgid with misery, it’s basically the jukebox musical from hell. Joaquin Phoenix, reprising his Oscar-winning performance from the controversial 2019 movie, croaks his way through a selection of standards in a voice that may remind you of the late Joe Cocker or the sound of glass being churned into little crystalline bits in the garbage disposal. 

Meanwhile, costar Lady Gaga, an eccentric, electric singer who would have triumphed in the Golden Age of American musicals, has been encouraged to tone down her energy to embrace the film’s grime and grimness. It’s like hiring Liza Minnelli to play a chimney sweep. Most of her singing has a fragile tentativeness to it, as if she were unsure how much to push her voice in choir practice.

You’ll be happy and grateful for those few moments where she’s allowed to belt out a number, or part of a number. But Folie doesn’t want you to be happy.  

The story is simple. Joker, a.k.a. Arthur Fleck, is heading to trial for all the murders and mayhem he unleashed in the first film. His defense attorney (Catherine Keener), crisp but compassionate, thinks he can get some sort of deal if a jury can be convinced that his Joker persona is just that — a monstrous identity cooked up in the cauldron of a nervous collapse. The defense, of course, will argue that there’s no distinction: Either way, the man is toxic trash.

You, as a stand-in juror in the audience, may likely think everyone in these proceedings should be held in contempt. Joker and Arthur are yin and yang — why debate the point? Why treat them as a yolk being separated from the white, passed back and forth between shell halves, when they’re just the same spectacularly cracked, rotten egg?

The film also offers the potential of a romance that will allow the Joker to rise to ever more delirious heights of cruel lunacy — he falls in love with Harley Quinn (played previously by Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad), a moon-eyed superfan who wants him to go for broke as the supervillain whom fate intended him to be. She’d be Eva Braun to his Hitler.

Thus you have the movie's folie à deux, two delusional personalities that paradoxically feed off each other and grow together. If director Todd Phillips had figured out how to create a genuine marriage of hearts and minds between these two sickos, Joker might have been a stunningly unsettling tale of erotic and spiritual passion, warped yet true.

But Phoenix and Gaga don’t have nearly enough chemistry. His performance, to give the movie what little credit it deserves, has actually deepened from the first film — the strain of mawkish masochism he  explored to such agonized depths in Joker this time suggests a tragic grandeur, something closer to Heather Ledger's take on Joker (still the best) in 2012's The Dark Knight.

But Gaga is dully earnest, struggling to match her costar’s tortured internal glower. It’s a terrible disappointment after her exciting, vivid turn as an Italian wife with murder on her mind in House of Gucci. But that performance was purely external, with the garish flashiness of costume jewelry.   Joaquin pretty much swamps her here.

Making things even worse, as mentioned earlier, is how Gaga is held back in the musical numbers, which also happen to be uniformly coarse, ugly and rancid. Well, what else would they be, in a movie that’s also coarse, ugly and rancid?

And yet even this problem should have been surmountable, especially with Gaga's titanic talent — a song delivered and staged with verve, panache and wit can bloom in the nastiest of scenarios. There’s Cabaret, a worm-ridden, sour apple of a movie musical that nonetheless won a slew of Oscars. There’s even South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.

In the end, nothing in Folie is as good as Gaga's tie-in album, Harlequin. In this collection of (mostly) pop classics, she sings in a confident swing style edged with an unexpected hint of bitterness and panic. It's Judy at Carnegie Hall for Generation Z.

Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters now.