Observing the darkness in his work, it’s tempting to look for its source in his personal history. I’m sure you want some Freudian explanation, perhaps there is.” “From a very young age, I had an allergy to-what’s the word?-to just frivolous, meaningless kids’ stuff,” he says. That began a run of finely wrought indie performances.
#JOAQUIN PHOENIX JOKER MOVIE#
In 2010, he flummoxed everyone by playing a semifictional version of himself as a self-destructive actor trying to build a hip-hop career for the mockumentary I’m Still Here-a movie that further complicated the line between reality and fiction when director Casey Affleck was sued for untoward behavior by two female crew members-before returning with a bravura performance in The Master, as the unhinged devotee of an L. Before that, in Spike Jonze’s Her-during which he met his fiancée, costar Rooney Mara-he was a lonely depressive who finds love in his computer’s operating system. In Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, from 2017, he played a damaged hit man who kills rich men who rape underage girls by hitting them with a ball-peen hammer. Phoenix has always had an intuitive feel for the dark side of the human psyche. His satisfaction comes as he stands in amongst the madness.” Or you can say this is somebody that disproportionately needs a large quantity of people to be fixated on him.
“You can either say here’s somebody who, like everybody, needed to be heard and understood and to have a voice. “There’s so many different ways of looking at it,” Phoenix says of the Arthur Fleck/Joker character. Phoenix mostly wants to let the film speak for itself. In some ways, it’s good that people are having a strong reaction to it.” “I didn’t imagine that it would be smooth sailing,” Phoenix says of the press reaction. Variety called Joker “the rare comic book movie that expresses what’s happening in the real world,” but Richard Lawson, writing for Vanity Fair, expressed another common sentiment, that it might be “irresponsible propaganda for the very men it pathologizes.” In Venice, Joker took home best film, which likely would have been more controversial had Roman Polanski not won the Grand Jury Prize.
#JOAQUIN PHOENIX JOKER DRIVER#
Suddenly, the film’s likeness to Taxi Driver reminded those with long memories that Scorsese’s 1976 film partially inspired the would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981. Directed by Todd Phillips as an homage to grimy 1970s and ’80s classics, especially those made by Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro (who costars), the film’s artful depiction of an alienated white man performing acts of nihilistic savagery has already rekindled the conversation over the relationship between Hollywood violence and the real-life kind seen last summer in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.Īfter the Venice Film Festival, where Joker premiered, a fiery debate erupted over the movie’s nuanced depiction of a character not unlike the “involuntary celibates,” or incels, behind recent mass shootings. On camera his cackling laughter, sheepish grin, and slow-blinking eyes channel unexpected heartbreak and humanity in a DC Comics villain from Batman-in fact, erasing any trace of comic books and instead presenting a character study of a fevered vigilante suffering from mental illness, alienation, narcissism, and latent rage.
In his latest role, as Arthur Fleck in the psychological comic book drama Joker, he transforms himself into a tortured and mentally unstable loner driven to highly inhumane acts of violence-against humans-in pursuit of a quixotic stand-up comedy career. Phoenix’s moral intensity and sense of comedy-that laugh-define his talent as an actor, along with a sense of vulnerability. Later, he tells me to “enjoy your swastika” before stepping out for a cigarette. “It’s up to you,” he says, and then bursts into maniacal laughter: “It’s so fucked up!” With an impish smile, he lets the comment hang.
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