Joker: Folie à Deux is a musical – don’t let the creators fool you

You may be confused by what genre Joker: Folie à Deux is – I certainly was before seeing the film. In August 2022, we discovered that the sequel about the infamous DC villain would be a musical. Then, as the release date approached, the director and stars appeared to backtrack on that.

Director Todd Phillips told Variety, “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead”. Meanwhile Lady Gaga expressed at Venice, “I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is a musical”, with Joaquin Phoenix adding in Variety, “it was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical”.

Well, I saw Joker 2 ahead of its worldwide release on 4 October 2024 – and I’m sorry, but this IS very much a musical. The reluctance to give it that label from the cast and creator only confuses audiences and highlights a problem that was also present in the marketing for the first film.

Minor spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux below

Why is Joker: Folie à Deux a musical?

Any basic definition of a musical – from Cambridge Dictionary, BBC Bitesize or Brittanica – tells us that a musical is a play or film in which songs are woven into the narrative, sung by the characters, with optional dancing.

With over 15 songs throughout, including sections with a whole brass band, spotlights, theatre costumes and even Phoenix doing a bloody tap-dancing jig, I find it hard to see how people can argue that Joker 2 isn’t a musical.

Sure, a lot of the high-production numbers mostly take place in Arthur Fleck’s head, and not every note is perfect, but this still fits within the parameters of what a musical would be. If this film were adapted for the stage, there would be no debate about what it was.

But let’s try and understand where Todd Phillips is coming from. He gave the following quote to Variety:

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 into the street, and the police are dancing… No disrespect, because I loved In the Heights.

Now I agree, in no way is Joker: Folie à Deux like In the Heights – we don’t have Arthur Fleck with a whole entourage joyfully prancing through the streets of Gotham in a swimming costume to 96,000… although now I kind of want to see that.

However, if my degree in Theatre and Performance has taught me anything (and let’s hope so, it cost me enough) musicals aren’t all rainbows and sunshine. Some deal with topics adjacent to those explored in the Joker films, how society chews people up and spits them back out – examples I’ve seen include Standing at the Sky’s Edge and Blood Brothers, though there are plenty of others.

Two key things are going on here. One: many people detest musicals (I’ve met several), so the team are trying to play it safe by not turning off any potential song-and-dance haters, even if that means fundamentally denying what happens in this film. That may work for many superhero fans, or Scorsese film nuts who enjoyed the first Joker.

Secondly, I think this is some good old-fashioned genre snobbery – and that’s something we’ve seen before.

Arkham Asylum? Never heard of her babe

Todd Phillips discusses in this The Hollywood Reporter roundtable how Joker was an anti-comic book film and told The Wrap that he got Phoenix onboard by saying, “Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film”.

That distancing from the source material is also present in the second film. Despite being the most visited location in the movie, the words ‘Arkham Asylum’ are never mentioned, even though the location is printed around the set at various points. ‘Gotham’ is also only said out loud once, while Harley Quinzel calls herself ‘Lee’.

It feels like the film thinks it’s too good to be a comic book movie or a musical, and that if it admits it’s too closely related, it will lose its spark – and that’s just not true.

HBO’s The Penguin – a spin-off of Matt Reeves’s take on The Batman – very much knows the world it’s in and still manages to be a stellar story filled with violence, grit and crime. So, it can be done.

Macall Polay/HBO

But perhaps one of the biggest missteps of Joker: Folie à Deux is that it underuses one of its leads, someone with incredible musical talent who could have taken this film to the next level.

Release the Gaga cut

I’m not going to shy away from it – I love Lady Gaga. When I was a teenager, I performed a tribute to her at my school, mimicking some of her most iconic costumes (I’ll leave you to guess there). When I saw she would be the new Harley Quinn, I was stoked.

Sadly, I left the screening feeling quite deflated. While she gets to flex the complexity of her character in the first half, she takes a backseat, quite literally, in the courtroom sections that dominate the latter part of the story.

What’s worse is that there are many iconic moments in the trailer and posters that have seemingly been left on the cutting room floor, or were put in the promotional material as misdirects. Joker and Harley strutting down the stairs, Harley staring dead at the camera, and her unexpected kiss with a female bystander that was spotted during filming.

We don’t get to see Gaga reach her full potential as Harley Quinn – and that’s such a shame because her pathological lying behaviour could have fuelled her bizarre dynamic with Arthur Fleck even further.

Gaga has a similar pattern with the musical numbers, getting the opportunity to show off her jazz growls during a prison sequence, and her piano skills during another.

However, this is a performer with a background in musical theatre, who is known for her incredibly dramatic performances of songs such as that VMA’s Paparazzi performance which concluded with her hanging ‘dead’ at the centre of the stage. We could have got something so much more disturbing and visually impressive than what made the final edit.

Final Joker Folie à Deux thoughts

By Joker: Folie à Deux distancing itself from both the musical genre and DC, it doesn’t really know what it is. I left the theatre confused, with emotional whiplash from the clash of stellar moments such as the unique opening, before being bogged down by the film’s sluggish pace. It felt too pretentious for its own good.

But who knows? Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps many of us are not supposed to be clever enough to ‘get’ Joker 2, and that’s what Phillips wants us to feel and reflect on. The polarising reviews – both online and even in the cinema I was in – certainly seem to tell that story.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but imagine what this film could have been if it wasn’t scared of its actual genre and source material, and if Gaga had been allowed to truly let loose.

READ SOURCE