Joker. MA15+
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Five stars
Clowns. I loathe clowns. Not coulrophobia. I'm not afraid of clowns, despite what a good job Andy Muscietti did with the second chapter of Stephen King's It - still playing in some cinemas. No, I hate them.
What gets sold as comedy and flash, I see as sadness and desperation. It makes me a bad date at a circus, but strangely, it makes me wildly over-identify with Todd Phillips' dystopic origin story for Batman's arch nemesis.
For all the violence, the encyclopaedia of darker mental illnesses, the despairingly familiar landscape of a civilisation in decline, this is a twistedly gobstopping film, and I could not get enough.
It comes from the DC Comics world of characters - this is the same Joker that Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger played - but most upsetting to many comic book die-hards is that writer-director Todd Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver have conceived a new beginning for the Joker.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a children's party clown absolutely in the wrong business considering his chronic depressions, his court-appointed psychiatric sessions, and a Tourette's-like condition that sees him wildly laughing in inappropriate moments.
His mother (Frances Conroy) has shaped his fragile inauthentic belief in his ability to make others laugh, but as Arthur comes to understand her belief may not be based in reality, the cracks in his foundations become apparent.
Life has stomped all over Arthur and in the scene that drastically changes the film's tone, so do a bunch of American Psycho-throwback Wall Street types.
Arthur begins to fight back in a vigilante moment that begets copycat acts across the city.
When city fat-cat Thomas Wayne, employer of the slain Wall Street frat-boys, makes some emotive statements about the lower classes being "clowns", the seams of a city that had been descending slowly towards unruliness and anarchy start to pull apart.
Dark Knight fans won't like the depiction of Batman's dad here. Thomas Wayne is a blow-hard buffoon, possibly a bit of a contemporary political caricature.
The Gotham of the Tim Burton films was supposed to look dystopian thanks to the artful placement of scrunched newspaper and neon, while under the engineering of Wes Anderson's sometime production designer, Mark Friedberg, this Gotham - set some time in the early '80s - feels believably familiar, parts post-GFC Detroit, pre-gentrified Harlem, and beautiful downtown Damascus.
Who would have thought a film this rich in things to both look at and ponder would come from the team behind The Hangover, Phillips and Silver (and their Hangover star Bradley Cooper, with a producer credit here)?
They honour their references - one of my favourites harks back to Michelle Pfeiffer's "Hell Here" moment from Batman Returns - while the film's third act draws from Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver.
Last year the National Film and Sound Archive hosted an exhibition curated from the personal effects of actor Heath Ledger, one of the prized items being Ledger's "Joker Diary".
When preparing for a role, Ledger would begin journaling his ideas and observations.
In the book he used to help construct his Joker, the role that would win him a posthumous best supporting actor Oscar, he began writing in the character's voice, becoming ever darker in tone.
Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck, too, carries around with him a diary - in theory the comic observations that might help him make his fortune as a stand-up comedian.
This is a dark collection of ideas - "I just hope my death makes more cents than my life."
Phoenix's preparation for and commitment to this role honours Ledger and his other predecessors, with an exhausted physicality, contortionist and Gollum-gaunt.
He is in almost every frame of the film and his mesmerising performance makes the unpalatable and upsetting fascinating.