Joker: The monster in the deck

Joker (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for dramatic intensity, violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.4.19

Heath Ledger has some serious competition.

Actors have craved playing villains ever since Shakespeare’s era; as the cliché goes, it’s because they get the best lines. There’s a certain truth to that, just as the challenge of persuasively portraying madness carries its own allure.

As we initially meet him, Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix), much too socially awkward to hold a
"regular" job, makes ends meet — barely — by dressing up as a clown, and trying to
bring some joy into people's lives.

But that’s only half the equation. Unless one believes that evil emerges from the womb that way, it’s even more fascinating to depict the evolution of a monster: the downward spiral that transforms a disenfranchised — but otherwise placid — individual into a violent sociopath.

That’s where director/co-scripter Todd Phillips — sharing the writing credit with Scott Silver — truly shines. Joker is an uncomfortably disturbing portrait of an awkward misfit who’s just perceptive enough to recognize — and eventually resent — the fact that society doesn’t give a bent copper penny about him. He’s one of the “invisibles”: the exponentially expanding mass of homeless, jobless and unloved, utterly ignored by the One Percenters who don’t even glance in his direction.

If this sounds disturbingly similar to current events, that’s no accident. Phillips and Silver unerringly tap into the rising anxieties of middle-class, blue-collar and working poor individuals who have lost patience with the system, and therefore are willing to hitch their wagons to a movement or charismatic individual … even if he is a lunatic. 

Phillips and Silver exploit that angst so well, that at times Joker feels like the match about to be tossed into a dynamite-laden basement.

(Which explains Warner Bros.’ serious case of the jitters, while releasing this film in the wake of last week’s “mass shooting threat” directed at U.S. movie theaters. Recall that 2012’s Colorado slaughter took place during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises.)

Of course, Phillips and Silver’s script is merely the template; Joaquin Phoenix brings it to chilling life. His performance is an all-in depiction of mental instability: of — as initially introduced — a social outcast desperately trying to hang on to meager crumbs of civility and sanity. The film opens on cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s tight-tight-tight close-up on Phoenix, cast as hapless Arthur Fleck, who mumbles, stumbles and chain-smokes his way through an interview with a tight-lipped but sympathetic social worker (Sharon Washington, aces in a brief role).

She asks to see his journal. He reluctantly shares it. We glimpse some of the pages, and regret having done so. The message is clear: This film will be relentlessly, unapologetically uncomfortable. Fasten your seat belts; it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot: A rewarding stroll

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for dramatic intensity, alcohol abuse, nudity, sexual candor and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.27.18

The quickest entry to John Callahan’s caustic, macabre and self-deprecating sense of humor is to understand that this film takes its title from his 1989 autobiography, written 17 years after the traffic accident that left him a C5-6 quadriplegic.

As John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) begins to morph into an actual human being, he's
helped along the way by the kindness and patience of Annu (Rooney Mara).

His scratchy, hilariously irreverent cartoons appeared everywhere for a time, from Omni and Harper’s to National Lampoon and Penthouse. Most notably, his work was featured for 27 years in the Portland, Ore., newspaper Willamette Week, where both he and the staff delighted in the occasional protests and boycotts by enraged readers.

That reaction remains true to this day. You can’t help laughing at most of Callahan’s work, but then — just as quickly — you wonder whether you should.

All this said, he isn’t necessarily an ideal subject for a biographical drama … particularly one that wishes to be factually and emotionally accurate. He was as aggressively confrontational as his cartoons; for quite a number of years before and after the accident, he also was an exceptionally nasty alcoholic. It’s not easy to spend two hours with such an unpleasant person, and Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t hold back; his depiction of Callahan is quite brutal at times.

But we are a species which, by nature, believes in the miracle of epiphanies … and few individuals have undergone a greater change. That isthe stuff of captivating film dramas.

Director/scripter Gus Van Sant has spent the bulk of his career crafting compelling sagas about equally challenging — and often unlikable — individuals, from Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho up through To Die For, Elephant and Paranoid Park. His films intrigue not only for their unusual characters, but also for the often non-linear manner in which he lets a saga unfold.

That’s particularly true of Don’t Worry, which structures its (more or less) chronological narrative via Callahan’s candid recollections, as depicted during numerous Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; a chance encounter with young neighborhood skateboarders; and while addressing a crowd at a popular public presentation, after he had become quite famous. These sequences are further interspersed with animated versions of Callahan’s signature cartoons.

The running thread — the moral — is consistent throughout: Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Shrug it off, whatever it is, and take control.

A valuable lesson: one that took Callahan years to recognize, understand and embrace.

Irrational Man: The perfect crime?

Irrational Man (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, sexual candor and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Lively philosophical discussions can be vicarious fun, but — as this film’s title character frequently reminds us — the theories of Sartre, Nietzsche and Kant don’t hold sway in the real world of blood, sweat and tears.

And when somebody does take such concepts to heart ... well, that can be a dangerous thing indeed.

Despite gentle admonitions from Abe (Joaquin Phoenix), who is trying to be the
responsible adult, Jill (Emma Stone) allows herself to fall in love with him. And, truth be
told, Abe probably doesn't mind that much...

Woody Allen’s newest dramedy is another of his occasional musings on crime and punishment — with that deliberate nod to Dostoyevsky — to be placed on a shelf alongside 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and 2005’s Match Point. In each case, we’re confronted with a character who tries to argue himself into a “just” crime ... whereupon, as viewers, we’re forced to confront how subsequent events challenge our own comfort zone.

It’s an unsettling notion, because we prefer our murderers to be easily identifiable lunatics along the lines of Charles Manson or Robert Pickton. No surprise, then, that Agatha Christie based her entire mystery career on the opposite notion: that casual killers likely live among us, cheerfully interacting with friends and neighbors on a regular basis.

But the bad guys and gals always get caught, in a Christie novel. Not necessarily so in real life, or in a Woody Allen film, where chance and circumstance might allow somebody to get away with murder. A sobering thought, and even more so Allen’s directorial approach makes things so light and droll.

Philosophy professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), emotionally damaged and forever awash in single-malt scotch, has accepted a summer session post at Braylin, a small East Coast college. He drags along a cloud of dark despair like a puppy on a leash, barely able to muster the will to show up for each day’s classes.

He’s a shattered idealist: a former political activist and impassioned deep thinker, who traveled the world and tried to help victims in disaster zones ... only to conclude that, for all his efforts, nothing changed. People continue to suffer and die; evil governments and corporations continue to aid and abet such misery. So what’s the point?

There’s also something mildly troubling, even dangerous, about Abe. This isn’t a jovial, rumpled university rascal along the lines of Michael Douglas’ Grady Tripp, in the 2000 adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Abe radiates anxiety like musk; we’re hardly surprised when, at a party, he impulsively seizes a pistol and horrifies everybody by spinning the chamber and playing Russian roulette with himself.

Inherent Vice: A very bad trip

Inherent Vice (2014) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, graphic nudity, sexual content, constant drug use and occasional violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.23.15

This deranged flick is best imagined as an unholy love child spawned by Chinatown and every Sam Spade novel Dashiell Hammett never wrote.

Glimpsed through a peyote haze.

Private detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, left) and maritime lawyer Sauncho
Smilax (Benicio Del Toro) watch from an oceanside restaurant as a suspicious
schooner — recently re-christened the Golden Fang — makes its way into port,
its purpose certain to be illicit.

Thomas Pynchon is challenging under the best of circumstances, which also can be said of director/scripter Paul Thomas Anderson, whose oeuvre features aggressively peculiar films such as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and The Master. Put these two eclectic minds together, and the results are far from the best of circumstances.

At its better moments, Anderson’s take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is a funny pastiche of 1940s film noir atmosphere and attitude, filtered through the drug-hazed cheesecloth of 1970s hippiefied Los Angeles. The characters are manic, the dialog heightened far beyond stratospheric visibility, and the unfolding plot a crazy-quilt conspiracy that gets more flamboyantly, hilariously preposterous by the minute.

You can’t help admiring the self-indulgent audacity ... except, well, too much rapidly becomes way too much. The stoner somnambulance through which every character delivers his lines becomes trés tedious, and a tedious film wears out its welcome long before the clock winds down on its 148-minute running time.

Anderson, it should be noted, never makes short films. He should consider doing so.

Pynchon’s 2009 novel exists in the same seemingly random, psychedelic fever that was typical of Richard Brautigan’s work in the 1960s and ’70s. If so-called “free jazz” is music without melody, then Brautigan’s prose was words without context: sentences strung together solely to befuddle and amuse. Brautigan was adored by the counter-counter set, who no doubt found his books far more compelling when read aloud under the influence of LSD.

Inherent Vice is similarly haphazard, with bizarre characters wandering into our protagonist’s landscape like the pink elephants that haunt somebody enduring delirium tremens. We must consider Pynchon’s history: As we’re reminded in a delightful December analysis in the Los Angeles Times, Pynchon’s third novel, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, won the National Book Award ... “and caused the Pulitzer Committee to cancel that year’s fiction prize after it found the book ‘unreadable’ and ‘obscene.’ ”

Inherent Vice is somewhat more coherent, but that’s not saying much. Indeed, it could be argued that the entire story is a marijuana-induced nightmare experienced by main character Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix): In other words, nothing that we see is real. The film dares us to imagine this from the very first scene, as Doc views the unexpected arrival of former girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Wilson) with surprise, and she murmurs, almost to herself, “Thinks he’s hallucinating.”

That notion likely will make the film work better for some viewers, but it’s too easy an explanation. More complicated is the possibility that some of what we see is real ... and some isn’t.

I’ve serious doubts, for example, about the actual existence of Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), who both narrates this saga — providing indispensable linking commentary that helps us over the rough spots — and serves as Doc’s sounding board. Eventually, it seems odd that nobody else seems to interact with Sortilège, suggesting that she’s the personification of Doc arguing with himself.

Perhaps.

her: Character flaws

her (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

Writer/director Spike Jonze’s new fantasy is an intriguing cautionary tale aimed squarely at the narcissistic, self-absorbed millennials who increasingly behave as if social media isn’t merely an acceptable substitute for personal contact, but in fact deserves to become the preferred method of interaction.

After confessing that he may be falling in love with his computer operating system,
Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is surprised when his longtime friend Amy (Amy Adams)
doesn't react with disgust. Indeed, she seems quite okay with the concept...

In that respect, Jonze displays an uncanny instinct for depicting our deeply disturbing near-future, if such conduct continues unchecked along its current path.

Much as I admire the message, however, the delivery system leaves something to be desired. At 126 minutes, this film is self-indulgent to a fault, moving s-l-o-w-l-y to the point of ponderous tedium, en route to a resolution that we can see coming from miles away.

Were Rod Serling alive today, I’ve no doubt he could have turned this premise into a dynamite half-hour installment of his Twilight Zone TV series (assuming placement on HBO or some other pay-cable network, to preserve the essential adult themes). Jonze, taking a much more leisurely approach, drags us for an monotonous ride that had me checking my watch during the entire second hour.

Jonze burst onto the cinema scene with 1999’s Being John Malkovich — which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best director — and has built his subsequent big-screen career on eccentric and downright bizarre relationship dynamics. He most famously teamed with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman for 2002’s Adaptation, the latter insisting on co-crediting that script with his “fictitious twin brother” Donald, both of whom were depicted in the film by Nicolas Cage.

Adaptation was an alternately hilarious and disturbing analysis of the creative process, and Jonze’s new film certainly follows that template. But instead of a fictitious twin, this story’s co-protagonist is the disembodied voice of a computer operating system that possesses intelligence, perception and a capacity for emotional growth.

In other words, the perfect example of artificial intelligence.

The setting is Los Angeles in a “slight future” that is a welcome utopian relief from the Blade Runner-esque hellholes envisioned in too many recent sci-fi films. The overall infrastructure in this vision of Southern California looks and feels familiar, aside for a greater emphasis on towering buildings, and the ambiance is warm, comfortable and embracing. People wear nice clothes, the weather seems ideal, food is plentiful and tasty, and there’s no trace of crime, neglect or poverty.

OK, so maybe it’s a bit soulless ... which is, of course, precisely the point.