Joaquin phoenix joker quotes movie#

The look and the sound - cinematography by Lawrence Sher, cello-heavy score by Hildur Gudnadottir - connote gravity and depth, but the movie is weightless and shallow. It’s hard to say if the muddle “Joker” makes of itself arises from confusion or cowardice, but the result is less a depiction of nihilism than a story about nothing. Joker’s embrace of radical evil becomes a kind of integrity. His profound alienation also arises from social inequality, the decline of civility, political corruption, television, government bureaucracy and a slew of other causes. Arthur’s uncontrollable laughter arises from a medical condition that is possibly the result of childhood abuse. Skinny, twitchy and at times startlingly graceful - Phoenix is one of the modern screen’s underrated dancers - Arthur has a physical and psychological resemblance to Freddie Quell, the misfit drifter Phoenix played in “The Master.” But he also carries the burden of being a victimized Everyman in a parable that can’t get its story straight.

The problems arise when the film revs its allegorical engine and Phoenix tries to assemble a character from the tics and tropes he has been given. Arthur has a connection to the Wayne family - we meet Alfred the butler and young Bruce - and also to Arkham Asylum. There’s nothing wrong with any of these plot points, or with the details that knit “Joker” into the familiar Batman world. This time out, he’s in the big chair, feeding the celebrity obsessions of Arthur Fleck. The cleverest bit here is casting Robert De Niro as a late-night, Carsonesque talk-show host similar to the one played by Jerry Lewis in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.” In that movie, De Niro was the crazy stalker, a talentless wannabe presuming to breathe the same air as his idol and quarry. You might wonder how this could be the work of the same Todd Phillips who directed “The Hangover” and “Road Trip,” which have at least a reputation for being funny. The hallmark of this “Joker” is its solemn witlessness. He can sneer like Jack Nicholson, snarl like Heath Ledger or … I’m still not sure what Jared Leto was doing, but never mind.Īs embodied by Joaquin Phoenix, he laughs a lot - enough to ensure that no one else will. The Joker, an embodiment of pure anarchy, can be played light or heavy, scary or fun or all at once.

“Joker” is a supervillain origin story, involving a character whose big-screen résumé already includes three Oscar winners (two for other roles, but still). It barely even works within the confines of its own genre, the comic-book movie. And this is the second time we see him dancing, and it’s a little bit of Joker coming out, a little bit more than the scene before and a little bit less than the next time we see him dance. So music and dance became a theme in the film.

It made sense to us because when I first met with Joaquin and we first started talking about “Joker,” I talked to him that Arthur is one of those people that has music in him. And he just starts doing this dance, and we both kind of look at each other and said, O.K., that’s the scene. There’s 250 people on the crew waiting outside. And Joaquin just started to dance to the music, and it was just me and him alone in the bathroom. And I just wanted to play Joaquin this piece of music. Hildur Gudnadottir is our composer, and she’d been sending me music throughout, while we were shooting. And it was about an hour into it and I said, hey, you know, I got this piece of music from Hildur. Why would Arthur care to hide his gun? And we really kind of tossed around a million ways to just do something different.

And when we got to the set on the day, Joaquin and I just sort of stood around like, this doesn’t really seem very Arthur. In the script, Arthur was to come into the bathroom, hide his gun, wash off his makeup, and staring at himself in the mirror like what have I done. What’s interesting about this scene to me is it’s entirely different than what we had scripted. I’m the director of “Joker.” So this scene is interesting because it’s right after a life-changing cataclysmic event in Arthur’s life, and he’s found this little kind of rundown park bathroom to go in and collect his thoughts and get himself together. Transcript ‘Joker’ | Anatomy of a Scene Todd Phillips narrates a sequence from “Joker.”

Joaquin phoenix joker quotes