The Last Laugh: JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX

Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux puts his own Joker on trial and declares it guilty. That makes for a pretty interesting gambit, but awfully hollow results. Still, I admired its commitment to putting the biggest supervillain on the stand to ask its audience: why do you even like this guy? He’s a narcissistic murderer and seeing him in something approaching our reality—in a news show interview, in a courtroom, surrounded by normal folks in a serious setting while looking a clown—has a frisson of discomfort. Such glum intent makes sense flowing from the 2019 origin story that took the usual flamboyant clown we see fighting Batman into something closer to a believable scenario. There he was a street performer on whom abuse had been piled for decades leaving him lonely, harassed, mentally disturbed, and violently delusional. By the time he became a serial killer in a loud suit, dancing down the street caked in makeup, and taking a loaded gun onto the set of a late night show, he was a scary, and weirdly compelling, blend of inchoate ideas about what makes people a danger to themselves and others. That that movie flirted with turning him into a kind of folk hero—Travis Bickle meets Bernie Goetz, fitting reference points for a movie so self-consciously vintage—added to the queasy-making mood. Batman’s most famous foe often has that sort of outlaw nihilistic appeal in other projects. As much as Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger’s Jokers are clearly villainous, there’s also that chaotic charisma that makes them appealing to watch. But Joaquin Phoenix’s emaciated oddity is so pathetic and repellant in Phillips’ vision that it’s hard to square the antihero his film’s world percolates with. Same, too, its feints at moral complexity that just reads as simple sensationalism.

The sequel starts with him in prison, occasionally beaten by guards while awaiting trial. The course of the movie follows that trial, as his lawyer (Catherine Keener) tries to get him an insanity defense, while District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) seems to have a slam-dunk case since the Joker himself can’t help but work against his own best interests. It’s in his nature. He’s also in love with a toxic fan, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a psychiatrist with a flair for the dramatic. She’s fueling his delusions with her own. As the movie winds its way through testimony that recaps the first film’s crimes, Joker drifts into fantasy sequences in which he romances Harley through musical numbers set to slow, jazzy covers from the Great American Songbook done up like MGM dream ballets and 70s variety show numbers. As I go through the film’s component parts it sounds pretty good: a prison movie, a courtroom drama, a tragic romance, a dark musical, and all with recognizable comic book names. Yet in practice, the thing is a blend of fascinating and dull. Every choice is striking and theoretically interesting, with lots of neat work with smoke and spotlights in the cinematography and an eerie sound design. But cumulatively the whole project says nothing much. It loses even a loose sense of psychology as it edges closer to growing outsized without ever quite getting there, stranded stylistically stifled between something uncomfortable and small and something more epic and excessive. It simply stretches thinly over two-and-a-half hours, losing a sense of Joker’s complexity in its repetitions and never bringing Harley into as clear focus, despite Gaga’s great look and tone. For some reason, she’s all rising action, and never gets to pop off like Phoenix did the last time around. I kept imagining a Harley Quinn movie as committed to her as the first Joker movie was to him. And I liked the idea of a comic book movie (atypical of that genre as these are) entirely focused on the immediate consequences of the previous one. But, despite the best efforts of the cast and craftspeople, the movie never develops into anything more than an extended epilogue to the first, letting its potential drain away.

Robot Dreams: TRANSFORMERS ONE andTHE WILD ROBOT

It’s difficult to care about the Transformers as characters. They’re alien robots that turn into cars. We need them to come to Earth to make any sense. That at least gives them human characters to provide a sense of scale and stakes. When stuck on their own planet and left to their own devices, it tends to be just a bunch of boring nonsense. So here we are with Transformers One, a thinly-plotted prequel that intends to tell us how heroic Optimus Prime and villainous Megatron started out friends and then had a falling out that led them to war across the galaxy for centuries. I guess I never wondered that before. Unlike the enormous live-action efforts from Michael Bay that brought this toy franchise to the big screen—and, for my money, made it entertaining for once—this is a computer-animated family film that plays like a cheaper, smaller effort all around. It’s an eyesore, blandly designed in simple, smooth surfaces, dreary dull colors, and a limited emotional range. Its short runtime—not quite 100 minutes before credits—is as padded as the characters are thin. Every scene is flatly expository, dully trudging through three basic bits of plot information, the first two usually bits of exposition repeated from the previous scene. The leads are given functional chipper voice performances from Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. They seem to actually believe this Saturday Morning cartoon-level emoting asked for them. The rest of the Transformers are voiced by recognizable celebrities and given grating one-note personalities that exist to drive the dreary cliches forward. It’s about a plot by a cheery robot overlord to keep the vast working class robots down. Not a bad idea in theory, but in function it takes most of the movie to click into place and then ends with a tease for a theoretical conflict with the real Big Bad next time. Ah, well, nevertheless. By the time the robots learn how to transform, there’s a modest charge of visual candy to the swooshing and clicking. But that’s too little, too late. It’s another one of those meager brand deposits that thinks its audience is so eager, or so desperate, for more, they’d sit through a whole movie of preamble with the vague promise of getting to the good stuff in another movie entirely.

A far better animated family film about a robot is DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot. That studio has been experimenting with style for the last several years, finding fresher textures and designs than the usual rounded, plasticky Hollywood CG look. The Trolls sequels have terrains of felt and yarn, Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken has noodly arms and legs, Puss in Boots 2 has sketchy hand-drawn embellishments and painterly backdrops. Those films look neat, even if they’re not always entirely successful unto themselves. Leave it to Chris Sanders, co-director and writer of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, to paint with a specific brush. His movies are unusually distinctive animated studio product—personal, emotional, with a relaxed approach and comfortable emotionality. He builds characters with heartfelt presences and compelling dilemmas in quickly-drawn worlds bursting with lovely visual touches. His latest is no different. It has a soft watercolor look painted over the wire-frame animation, a dappling of primary colors dancing in the light over figures that move with precision. This makes its central interplay between nature and machine all the more vivid. The Wild Robot of the title is a missing personal assistant—think something the Jetsons might’ve ordered if Miyazaki was an Apple engineer—with a silver ball body, a pair of big, round, blue eyes, and telescoping arms and legs. She wanders around chirpily offering to help in a smoothly artificial Lupita Nyong'o performance. But because she’s crash-landed on a wilderness island, she finds a job for which she’s not prepared: adopted mother for an orphaned baby goose. The movie has a gentle cartooniness that marries its futuristic implications with old-fashioned wildlife gags around a morbid mother possum and a sneaky loner fox and gossipy geese and more. And on this charming smallness it builds a lovely allegory for motherhood—of kindness, protectiveness, cooperation, resourcefulness, self-sacrifice, unconditional love. It might threaten to sound too simple and formulaic—Bambi meets WALL-E with design inspiration from French impressionists; oh, wait, that sounds incredible. And then there’s a scene in which the bird's taking flight, flying fast, soaring higher and higher as the sun sets in the sky and its robot mother races to keep him in sight, and, look, I’m not made of stone. Here’s a movie that looks sensational, moves quickly, feels light and sprightly and funny and warm. It has gags and action and sentimentality. And then the tears flow.