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Why Do a Joker Musical If You Don’t Want to Do a Joker Musical?
Todd Phillips, a one-time purveyor of boys-will-be-boys frat comedies, can’t seem to embrace the flamboyance of the genre.
The likeliest explanation for this box-office fiasco might be the simplest: The crowd that made Todd Phillips’ violent, fashionably gritty origin story Joker a billion-dollar sensation was probably a bit less keen to see a movie in which the clown prince of crime sings and dances like Fred Astaire. The irony is that while Folie à Deux is enough of a musical to tick off both comic-book fans and the Broadway allergic — this is, again, a movie in which Batman’s most iconic foe mews his feelings instead of killing anyone — the film stages each number with curious hesitancy, as though it were embarrassed to go full Sondheim. When Arthur dreams of waltzing with Lee on the roof of Arkham — reimagined as a grand hotel bathed in the light of an oversize moon and a glowing neon sign — it’s a promising intrusion of artificiality that vaguely recalls the backdrop wonderment of Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris or Francis Ford Coppola’s infamously money-losing, early-’80s boondoggle One From the Heart(a natural evolution from the New Hollywood cosplay of the first Joker).
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