Joaquin Phoenix gives a piercingly intense performance in the otherwise grim 'Joker,' our critic writes
By Joe Morgenstern Oct. 3, 2019 3:45 pm ET Think of “Joker” as both dental drill and Novocain. This origin story of the famously depraved smiler deals in pain from start to finish—pain that the hero, Arthur Fleck, first suffers, then inflicts—and Joaquin Phoenix plays the title role with piercing intensity. Yet the film, directed by Todd Phillips, leaves you numb. And glum. Days after the screening I was still under its stultifying spell.
For almost 80 years the Joker has dominated the pantheon of comic-book villainy—not just as Batman’s nemesis, played most memorably on the big screen by Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Jared Leto, but as an endlessly renewable repository of evil leavened by zestful trickery and diabolical humor. Although stories of his origin have been spun before, this one declines to settle for facile explanations like facial disfigurement by acid.
Yet events leading up to this helpless victim’s lashing out at his persecutors, and to his transformation from Arthur to Joker, feel coldly contrived, even as they promise to make sense of the chaos that surrounds us in what passes for real life.
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