Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

          At least since Pagliacci the clown who laughs on the outside while crying on the inside is a most familiar figure, a sentimental cliché, but the much discussed new movie Joker takes that concept a good distance farther.  The title character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) works for a hire-a-clown agency, where he dresses in a costume and waves advertising signs, entertains children at parties and in hospitals.  A man singularly without joy, he suffers from a neurological problem that causes him to laugh uncontrollably for no reason, a condition that, not surprisingly, lands him in trouble when he laughs in the presence of the wrong people at the wrong time.

          A very different person from the Batman’s notorious adversary, Arthur lives with his disabled mother in a crummy apartment in Gotham City, stamping grounds of course for our old friend the Caped Crusader.  (Among references to other movies, including such disparate titles as Psycho and The King of Comedy, the Batman franchise dominates the plot, with names, people, and events that echo the comic books and the films).  Inevitably his character has inspired much learned commentary on his predecessors in the role; his makeup recalls several of them and his behavior perhaps most closely resembles Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character as a sort of Iago, in Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity casting about for an occasion.”  Since he lacks the compelling enemy represented by Batman, in effect he ends up striking out at any target that attracts him, and some of the attacks are shocking.

          Dogged by bad luck, his disability, and his extremely odd personality, Arthur finds his world increasingly frustrating, another motivation for his violent actions.  Since the comic book script takes his story all over the place, the movie often teeters on the brink of incoherence, with new stories frequently intersecting with Arthur’s daily life and all its problems; he embarks, for example, on a quest for the man he thinks is his father, a man who also becomes a victim of his increasing distance from reality; he may or may not have a girlfriend who lives in the same apartment building; he may or may not join the audience for a late night television talk show.   At times the movie makes it difficult to discern if he is living in the real world or in a fantasy of his own creation; at a certain point the real and the hallucinated world merge and Arthur commits a series of shocking crimes while the city explodes into violence.  His actions, one of them captured on television, inspire riots that serve as the background to what becomes his homicidal insanity.

          Perhaps because of its origin in comic books, Joker displays a kind of drab, muddy color scheme and a consistently squalid setting.  Gotham City entirely lacks glamor and most of the dwellings, especially Arthur’s apartment, look shabby and grimy, needing paint, repairs, cleaning.  Even the talk show that Arthur ultimately appears on—with Robert De Niro playing the host—looks dark and dull, without the brightness and glitter one would expect from show business.

          Although Joaquim Phoenix no doubt deserves some praise for his performance, which must have been a grueling experience, the horrible sound of his endless cackle and the constant closeups of the pained rictus of his grinning countenance grow difficult to endure.  The insane violence of his actions adds another level of disquiet to the film’s subjects and incoherent themes, which somehow manage to be simultaneously excessive and narrowly defined.    

          Perhaps at least partially as a result of the publicity and the debate surrounding the movie, Joker enjoys a record size box office, and apparently its nihilistic themes strike a chord in certain young people, so troubling a notion that some theaters post a security guard in the audience.  Personally, I am not sorry I saw the film, but somewhat sorry it exists for me to see it.

New Chick Flick

New Chick Flick

          Always happy to jump on a bandwagon, the reviewers now crow about the new wave of liberated women in contemporary cinema, perhaps another, more positive spin on MeToo.  The gushing over Wonder Woman  somehow omitted to mention that the movie was really just another superhero flick, dependent on the usual stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer generated images, as much a silly comic book as any of a dozen of its predecessors—the Batman franchise, the Iron Man franchise, the Spider-Man franchise, etc., etc.  A comic book is a comic book, a superheroine differs not at all from a superhero, and given the wondrous technology of contemporary cinema, anyone of any sex can spin and fly through the air, shoot out thunderbolts, battle monstrous villains, and wear a distinctive costume: big deal.

          With a good deal less fanfare and very little in the way of the fabled magic of the cinema, a couple of recent films further demonstrate the penetration of women and their roles in today’s movies.  Both Widows and The Kitchen show strong, independent women taking over roles that formerly belonged to men, specifically for most of them, the men they married.  Though based on quite different sources, they share a surprising similarity of subject, tone, and theme.  Oddly, however, in both films the women, generally represented as smart, tough, and resourceful, are also, not to put too fine a point upon it, criminals.  They steal, they kill, they destroy: what’s not to like?

          In Widows four women whose husbands, a group of thieves embarking on a big caper, are incinerated when their scheme goes terribly wrong, decide to finish the uncompleted job.  One of them finds her husband’s detailed map and designs for the robbery and decides to enlist the other widows in a scheme of their own.  They then follow the usual patterns of the big caper flick—casing the home of their quarry, a corrupt, mobbed up Chicago politician, assigning specialized tasks to each suitable member of the quartet, meticulously checking on bodyguards, security devices, schedules, etc., figuring out precise locations and timing, in short practicing all the methods of the form.

          The film then shows the actual robbery, which unsurprisingly escalates from a meticulously planned operation to a series of violent confrontations, shootings, and even a death.  In keeping with the traditions of the form, the action naturally enlists the audience on the side of the perpetrators, so the viewers in effect must root for the bad guys, one of the great paradoxes of so many crime movies.  The genre, whether featuring men or women, appeals to the spirit of criminality in all of us.

          Following a quite similar pattern, The Kitchen also features a trio of newly independent women carrying on the activities of their spouses, though in this case, the husbands have been incarcerated.  The title refers to the area of the West side of Manhattan known for generations as Hell’s Kitchen, a tough, largely Irish community, but also perhaps to the kitchens that the women leave in order to embark on their own criminal enterprise.  Bitter about their treatment from the Irish mob that controls the streets of their neighborhood, the women seek more financial support from the mob leaders, and when the crooks reject their requests, resolve to take matters into their own hands.

          That decision involves canvassing the neighborhood shops, informing the owners that they will now collect the protection money and provide the service that the mob never did.  When the local gangsters get wind of the development, a small war breaks out, and of course, the women eventually win it, then go on to bigger and better sources of income and power.  The two main characters, played by Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish, undergo some major transformations, approach the brink of an internal battle, but eventually settle for equal shares of territory, money, and power.

          The most impressive actions of both movies, more powerfully emphasized in The Kitchen, demonstrate a shocking propensity for violence.  The armed robbery and shootings of Widows follow a relatively logical path from the intricate planning to the execution of the scheme, an understandable result.  In The Kitchen, however, the women carry out a whole series of murders, most of them in cold blood, and come to enjoy the process as well as the profits; the movie really suggests a whole new level of viciousness for the chick flick, no longer a vehicle for romance and light comedy, or even for costumed superheroines performing acrobatics, but now a perfectly functioning addition to the long, crowded genre of crime film.  As they used to say, sisterhood is powerful, now it is very powerful.

          One of the differences between the two films may result from their different origins; Widows is based on a novel by Gillian Flynn, while The Kitchen began life as an apparently still running series of comic books.  That movie’s open ending implies more to come, though it doesn’t inspire in me any wish to see a sequel or read the comic books.  Both films, however, demonstrate how far the chick flick has progressed in the empowering of women, proving that they can commit crimes of all kinds as well as any cinematic males and behave with viciousness worthy of any gangster, even without dressing up in a dominatrix outfit.  The scene that perhaps best summarizes the distance the form has traveled amounts to the best pushing-on-old-lady-down-the-stairs act since Richard Widmark’s memorable moment in Kiss of Death.  It must be seen to be appreciated.