‘Joker 2: Folie à Deux’ Venice Film Festival Review: This Jukebox Musical Plays The Great American Songbook For People Who Used to Shop at Hot Topic

The musical, as a cinematic form, sits in such dire straits with audiences that most studios deliberately obscure when one of their movies operates within the genre. Look at the trailers for Joker: Folie à Deux, and it would not be entirely clear that Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 cultural phenomenon is a full-fledged song-and-dance extravaganza. What might sound like utter craziness on paper works surprisingly well as the vehicle for the villain’s second act.

To recapture the magic of such a singular sensation like Joker, a comic book movie that treated a supervillain’s origin story as a gritty character study, Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver turn to the movie musical to achieve a similarly expressive effect. (First, however, there’s a Looney Tunes-style cartoon by French animator Sylvain Chomet to ease viewers into a more figurative cinematic language.) While this might seem like a giant stylistic leap for the series, recall that Joaquin Phoenix has not one but two sequences of dance in the original film that help establish his transition from the misunderstood Arthur Fleck into the misanthropic Joker.

Adding a verbal element to compliment these physical manifestations of the character’s smug self-satisfaction works in the context of Joker: Folie à Deux. Locked up in Arkham Asylum following his murder spree, Arthur catches the eye of Lady Gaga’s Harley “Lee” Quinzel as he passes by her music class. It’s love at first sight as could only happen in the movies, and this lonely incel begins to hear the song in his heart that convinces him his affection could be reciprocated.

Ask any film student for the first word that pops into their head when they think about “musicals,” and they will probably spit back “utopia.” Leading theorist Richard Dyer was one of the first scholars to take the genre’s entertainment value seriously because he saw in them an expression of communities in a state of pure connective bliss. Arthur’s ecstatic musical numbers, flights of melodic fancy that play out the visions in his head and heart, embody the genre’s potential in finding freedom from documenting reality as it happens in favor of an experience as it feels.

These musical moments also serve to dissolve the barrier between artificiality and authenticity. As Victor Hugo once observed, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” These grand gestures in the film might not be real for Arthur and Lee in a literal sense. But just as they don makeup and masks in the guises of their villain alter egos, the Joker and Harley Quinn are true to them.

These scenes are not occasional stylistic flourishes that punctuate Joker: Folie à Deux. They are the movie’s very backbone and reason for existing. Phillips constructs what amounts to a jukebox musical from the Great American Songbook for people who used to shop at Hot Topic. Its closest stylistic equivalent is not any of the classic studio-era musicals featured in posters on the wall in the opening cartoon. Rather, it bears a striking resemblance to Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, which also deploys a central character’s musical reveries as a euphoric escape valve from a world increasingly hostile to their being.

“Todd Phillips constructs what amounts to a jukebox musical from the Great American Songbook for people who used to shop at Hot Topic.”

But on a more practical level, the film’s musicality helps prolong a single act of story arc into a full feature. Little in the way of events happen in Joker: Folie à Deux – it’s easily reducible to Arthur and Lee’s romantic arc as the backdrop for his murder trial at the hands of ambitious Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey). His exhausted attorney tries to argue in front of the jury what the musical numbers demonstrate to the audience: Arthur cannot be held accountable for the actions of a Joker persona that exists as a dissociative figment inside his mind.

The appeal of the film’s gambit wears thinner as the film progresses. It’s a relief that Phillips expands his palette beyond the early Scorsese cosplay in Joker, but one inspired idea cannot always sustain an entire film. (It’s an opaque veneer over the undergirding trollish sociology for sickos, a reactionary scapegoating of government agencies and the media to excuse Arthur’s behavior.) He might think he’s wielding the musical numbers like a scalpel to expose something lurking underneath Arthur’s prickly exterior, and maybe that’s true of the first time he breaks into a rapturous rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life.”

But the longer Folie à Deux drags on, the more this tool begins to feel like a sledgehammer instead. It’s a good reminder of why villains usually have one-film arcs in comic book movies; there’s only so much juice a script can squeeze from them. This newfound stylistic vigor helps extend the shelf-life of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, but by the time the end comes, this incarnation feels exhausted. There’s a whole lot of potential in Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn as the fresh-faced entry into this grimy Gotham, but she’s too frequently relegated to the sidelines. If ever there were someone who could expand the film’s vocal range, it would have been her.

Warner Bros. Pictures will release Joker: Folie à Deux in theaters on October 4.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.