While many critics and fans panned Todd Phillips’ box office bomb, Joker: Folie à Deux, legendary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino praised the film and filmmaker for its bold message.
Joker: Folie à Deux’s storyline picks up a few years after the events of Joker (2019) which follows Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) as he goes on trial for the murder of five people.
Though audience members couldn’t get behind the movie, Tarantino says he “really liked it.” Quentin Tarantino, who knows a thing or two about creative direction in movies, seems unfazed by the wave of critics panning film director Todd Phillips’s decision to branch into the musical space. (Hey, if you’re casting Lady Gaga, might as well add a musical sequence.)
“I really, really liked it, really, a lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino told the Bret Easton Ellis podcast. “But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise.”
What Is the Point of Joker: Folie à Deux?
Let’s be honest—the movie is a bit of a mess. It was a divisive artistic choice to take nearly $200 million dollars and isolate the film from the studio paying for it and the fan base that was built through the first few films from the same character plot line. It’s high art—the kind that Tarantino loves.
Tarantino has expressed his love for genre films that play against expectations. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was loosely based on the Manson Family Murders. Despite taking his time setting the stage to follow the true-life outcomes, Tarantino takes viewers in an entirely different direction, rewriting the ending the the real-life tragedy in a wildly unexpected way.
While he often pays homage to many of his favorite movies in his own work, Tarantino has been an advocate for risky films, like Rolling Thunder and Matador. For him, Joker: Folie à Deux is a giant middle finger for everyone who wants the sequel.
“The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money—he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? And then his big surprise gift—haha!—the jack in the box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake, and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you—is the comic book geeks,” Tarantino said.
The Pulp Fiction director went on to explain that he believes Todd Phillips is the Joker himself in some ways. In spending the studio’s money and making exactly the movie he wanted, “he’s saynig f— you to all of them.”
Understandably, not everyone will be a fan of that message. Many people—myself included—don’t often enjoy when a movie tells you through its quality that you are wasting your time with this movie.
But Phillips, who might have dug his own grave with the Hollywood studio system, seems comfortable enough in his career to tell people “no” by burning money like a real auteur.
Despite the movie being a flop, there is a lot to appreciate about the movie. Joaquin Phoenix and the fabulously talented Lady Gaga (who plays Joker’s love interest), are phenomenal actors who make you want to engage with the movie. There is just nothing to engage with beyond the characters, which is arguably the point Phillips is trying to make.
The cinematography, the editing, and the color grade make Joker: Folie à Deux a gorgeous film—but it is style over substance in this case.
Maybe it works for you. We know it worked for Quentin Tarantino.
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