The first thing you need to know about “Joker: Folie à Deux” is that it’s not a musical.
Sure, the opening sequence features posters of “Modern Times,” “Pal Joey” and “Shall We Dance.” One scene has the Arkham Asylum inmates watching the 1953 movie “The Band Wagon” — with Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) mouthing along to Fred Astaire and getting peeved when Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) refuses to watch. Another sees the two jailbirds singing the “Sweet Charity” showstopper “If My Friends Could See Me Now.” At one point, the Joker even starts to tap dance.
But tuneful moments and a few moves do not a musical make. And that disconnect between what the film appears to be and what it actually manages to pull off is at the core of its failure. Compared to Warner Bros.’ 2019 original, which won two Academy Awards and grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, director Todd Phillips’ sequel doesn’t have the courage of its own — or any great musical‘s — convictions. With an opening weekend domestic box office take of $40 million and a Cinemascore of D, it seems like audiences sniffed that out for themselves.
Make no mistake, though: It’s not that the musical genre — often erroneously reduced to smiley song-and-dance routines and happily-ever-after endings — can’t be as gritty and dark as “Joker” would require (see “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” “Assassins,” “Cabaret”). Or that it can’t tackle touchy topics like mental illness (“The Light in the Piazza,” “Anyone Can Whistle”), societal rejection (“Be More Chill,” “Oklahoma!”), drug dependency (“Next to Normal,” “Jagged Little Pill”), sexual assault (“Spring Awakening,” “The Color Purple”) or suicidal ideation (“Fun Home,” “Dear Evan Hansen”).
Musicals are similarly flexible in form, despite what haters might have you think. Characters in a musical can sing out their feelings because straightforward dialogue falls short of adequate self-expression, or break into song as a completely normal mode of communication in their world. Even committed realists can work within the musical genre, with an entirely diegetic score and a narrative framed around a concert or a performance.
In any of the above configurations, though, one thing remains true: a musical moves its story forward by taking seriously the disciplines — songwriting, vocal performance, orchestrations, dance, etc. — on which it’s built, showcasing, celebrating and even innovating these crafts. “Folie à Deux,” though it occasionally looks like a musical and sometimes even sounds like a musical, seems to take nothing seriously — except perhaps itself.
In particular, “Folie à Deux” grossly underestimates the storytelling power of the jukebox musical, which arranges existing music into a new narrative. While taking advantage of viewer familiarity with the melodies, jukebox musicals also have a unique opportunity to turn a hit song on its head, whether to reveal something new in the story or simply to be clever, like when “& Juliet” reframes Britney Spears’ “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” to detail a non-binary character’s identity journey, or “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” uses the seductive 1984 hit “Private Dancer” to score the singer‘s desperate resort to performing in Las Vegas bars.
Instead, most of the songs in “Folie à Deux” serve no apparent purpose, offering little new information or insight into its characters. With the exception of Lee referencing “(They Long to Be) Close to You” to cheekily illustrate her obsession with Arthur’s alter ego, it’s as if the film is name-dropping tracks rather than telling stories through them; it’d be like reading a syllabus and saying you’ve completed the class.
The movie also features baffling vocal performances from both Phoenix and Gaga. To express Arthur’s romantic attraction to Lee, Phoenix performs “For Once in My Life” and “Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered)” — songs regularly covered with the gusto of a lovestruck Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. But here, Phoenix — who previously showcased his powerful pipes in his Oscar-winning turn as Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line” — does so with frustrating weakness, which proves especially dreary against the lush orchestra accompanying him.
Maybe it’s because the emaciated Arthur isn’t in his strengthened Joker state that he can’t land the strongest vocal line, or because the actors were tasked with singing live on set. Still, so many standout stage numbers — “Flowers” from “Hadestown,” “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables” — begin relatively delicately, as its damaged characters are at their lowest moments, and are delivered with a fragility that’s both emotionally palpable and pleasing to the ear.
Phoenix only performs one solo as Joker: fittingly, “The Joker,” from the 1964 musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd.” And it’s quite a letdown, arriving 90 minutes into the courtroom drama and still hamstrung by vocal restraint. To what end? As decades of animated Disney movies have taught us, antagonists generally get the best musical numbers, with the freedom to be as egocentric and bombastic as, well, the Joker of the 2019 movie.
But the villain who deliciously danced down the Bronx’s Guason Stairs smoking, high-kicking and pelvic thrusting without remorse — a now-iconic minute-long sequence that arguably teased what a “Joker” musical could look like — is nowhere to be found in this sequel. All its musical numbers are dream sequences. Arthur/Joker could be as gifted a performer as he imagines himself to be — if not for his sake, then for the viewer‘s!
Likewise, Lady Gaga‘s vocal prowess is drastically underutilized — an unwise decision, since she’s one of the biggest pop stars in the world and won two Grammy Awards for her Great American Songbook tracks with Tony Bennett. (Strategically, Gaga just debuted “Harlequin,” a relatively theatrical companion album in which she covers some of the movie’s songs herself, regardless of which character performed them onscreen. I’m still debating if the release of her jazzy rendition of “Get Happy,” her guitar-driven version of “The Joker” and her originals “Folie à Deux” and “Happy Mistake” are a solace after seeing the film or salt in the wound.)
The most obvious proof of “Folie à Deux” misunderstanding the musical is the odd decision to cut the majority of these sequences short, kneecapping decades-old compositions before their emotional and musical resolutions. The reason for repeatedly doing so isn’t ever made clear and feels as jarring as suddenly cutting away from a fight scene or a soliloquy. If these numbers were actually filmed in full, hacking off their final bars might’ve cut the total runtime, but at the cost of vexing audiences even further.
Exacerbating the musical miscalculation of “Folie à Deux” is the creative team’s apparent embarrassment at their association with the genre. “I think the way that we approach music in this film was very special and extremely nuanced,” Gaga said at a Venice Film Festival press conference. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is actually a musical; in a lot of ways, it’s very different. The way that music is used is to give the characters a way to express what they need to say because the scene and just the dialogue is not enough.”
“I just don’t want people to think that it’s like ‘In the Heights,’ where the lady in the bodega starts to sing and they take it out onto the street, and the police are dancing,” Phillips said in a Variety cover story, referencing Warner Bros.’ jubilant 2021 release. “No disrespect, because I loved ‘In the Heights.’ ”
And as for all those off-key notes, “Neither Arthur nor Lee are professional singers, and they shouldn’t sound like they are,” Gaga told Vogue. Added Phoenix, “I encouraged [Gaga] to sing poorly.”
If Phillips had actually made a full-throated “Joker” musical, and celebrated it in the press, it would have been a creative risk worthy of admiration, even if it fell short. Instead, when Arthur begs Lee in a scene to “stop singing” and “just talk to me,” I couldn’t help but agree.
Good thing it’s not a musical.