Watched on Blu-Ray

Joker - A Breaking Bad Movie

In principle, everything has already been written for the film, "Joker" shows impressively, unattractively and radically where a capitalist society with a deficient labour and social system can lead. Superbly played by Joaquin Phoenix and equally high-quality musically underscored by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who partly based her score on Hans Zimmer's "The Dark Knight" score in terms of the pompous and melodic.

Following are a few observations and thoughts on my part, which I would like to express:

The dialogue between Arthur Fleck and the psychotherapist referencing "The Killing Joke" in the final scene of the film turns out to be an extraordinarily pointed final picture, which not only sums up Arthur Fleck's state of mind and his development towards the Joker, but also comprehensively sketches or announces Bruce Wayne's state of mind and his change towards Batman. In the scene Arthur starts to laugh and the therapist asks what is so funny. Arthur thinks he has come up with a joke, but she doesn't understand it. This is followed by a cut to Bruce next to his dead parents, so in my estimation this can only mean the joke the joker tells Batman in "The Killing Joke". The joke can only be understood by someone who has experienced traumatic moments and is as mentally broken as Arthur, moreover, Bruce Wayne, like Arthur Fleck, also becomes a masked avenger, who is celebrated and imitated by the population.

One of the often mentioned points of criticism is the repeated spelling out of the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, an implicit hint would have been much nicer. I disagree, the unambiguous pointing of the murder functions wonderfully as a contentual and formal element of expression of the reality psychosis structure, with nothing more than a hint it would have worked less well. Arthur Fleck suffers from psychoses that are treated with medication, but in the course of the plot, social benefits are cut in Gotham, so that his now unemployed psychiatrist can no longer prescribe him medication. As a result, his mental state worsens, psychoses occur more often, in the first half of the film the psychoses are exposed by plottwists, in the second half the film does without them or better said: the film doesn't succeed anymore in distinguishing between reality and psychoses. Todd Phillips stages both reality and the psychoses with equal clarity and spelling (in criticism: unsubtle), so if he had only implicitly hinted at the murder of the Waynes, this would accordingly represent a staged anomaly and be more clearly recognizable as reality. I find this ambiguity in the second half of the film quite fascinating; it is never quite clear whether Arthur Fleck's murders, the social uprisings and Arthur's transformation into a masked avenger and folk hero actually happen or whether they just stem from his psychotic inferiority complex.

By the way, I can hardly understand the comparisons with "Taxi Driver", explicitly I couldn't name any special scenes that remind us of the Scorsese movie. Only the general framework is similar here, i.e. that Arthur Fleck goes psychotically nuts and takes revenge on society. Apart from that, there are more and more references to "The King of Comedy", not least the casting of Robert De Niro as Arthur Fleck's beloved comedian and host of a late night show, otherwise I personally had to think more of "Breaking Bad" instead of "Taxi Driver" as mentioned above.

Downgrade from 4.5 to 4 stars

To read my review right after the cinema visit, click here: boxd.it/PTH7D