Peter Charney’s review published on Letterboxd:
The genuine disdain that permeated the Times Square IMAX with the beginning of each new musical number has fueled me tremendously. Thank you, Todd Phillips!
Look, I completely understand why folks hate this. It’s a 2-hour-15-minute prison drama/courtroom procedural that offers almost no action but includes more songs than many traditional musicals. Yet, I found this to be an extremely clever evolution of this character and his chosen forms of performative expression. When we find Arthur Fleck in prison, with all jokes (and Joker) beaten out of him, it’s a prison screening of The Band Wagon that is able to psychologically reawaken something within him. What follows is a surprisingly intricate exploration of movie musical performance as a means of identity, escapism, transcendence, or perhaps psychosis. For Phillips to execute this with such deliberate pettiness—essentially presenting a series of pedestrian karaoke renditions of classic songs—is, in its own way, inspired.
For all those who have watched a musical and cynically asked, “Why are they singing?” Joker: Folie à Deux actually has a really fascinating answer.
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