Nothing Funny About 'JOKER'

If you walk into the cinema hall, hoping to be entertained by a comedy film about a mass murdering crime mastermind, you can forget it. JOKER is so much more than this. It was never meant to be a comedy.

The storyline is amazingly depressing, in a good way (Oddly, as bad as it sounds). Joker is violently honest. Lately, I feel as if the public has been quite sensitive with the content or the kind of story that comes out on cinema. Movies now has a need to be politically correct or 'woke'. Not that it shouldn't. However, there would be essences of the storyline to be affected if changes were made.

The creators of Joker told the story of the man, Arthur, behind the mask as honestly as it can. If there's a word I can use to describe this film it would be RAW. The story is so raw and not sugarcoated in any way. This is a story of a man who was already broken, living in a broken world where people around you forces you to function 'well' in a world that is already corrupted. It was beyond repair for Arthur. He had nothing to lose but he kept losing against the system, the society, the city itself.

The story opens up beautifully as it introduces audiences to Arthur from his perspective. We see the things he went through, the shitty life he lives, the things he never had. It was all bad. We thought it was bad enough for Arthur seeing the way his life went but the conflict builds up to a much more personal level to his character, breaking up the pieces of his characters that was already broken. The journey going into the climax wasn't a mind-bending psychological trip at all. Joker is an easy film to read and understand on its surface but to understand the film, it really depends on the audience. Yes, one could sympathizes with Arthur but in all honesty, you know deep down it has always been the case for him. He was never meant to function for this world that didn't made sense to him. His actions are debatable.

Arthur wasn't a talkative character making it really interesting to me. For a film that is told strictly from his point of view, it would make sense if the script would contain monologues. Not for this film, it doesn't. Arthur doesn't speak much. Audiences are put in a place to feel empathy for this man through his actions only. And that, to me made Joaquin Phoenix deserves an Oscars nod. Leaving the hall, I felt an enormous sympathy for his character but I don't feel sorry for him. I still felt that whatever he did was evil and bad. All of these feelings came solely from watching Phoenix's performance as Arthur. The way he portrays Arthur was just so amazing. He was able to deliver Arthur's struggles and pain without even saying so much words and that to me, was a powerful acting.

The visuals for this film was also a masterpiece. The colour grading on each scenes were just beautiful. I love how the filmmakers gave a lot of their efforts in making the scenes more relatable to Arthur. The camera works were amazing, the scenes were almost poetic with Phoenix's dance as the joker giving the scenes more depth with its already beautiful cinematography.

Overall, this film is a masterpiece! It is amazing. It is sad, brutal, violent and depressing. The saddest take that I felt from this film was that Arthur never felt free as himself but he was liberated as the Joker. He was free from the world that forces him to function in a way, so he forces the world to submit to him with violence. In no way, did I ever think Joker was an icon of revolution. He never killed to 'prove a point'. He killed, because he wants to and he enjoys it but the oppressed sees it as a resistant stance against the oppressors.

JOKER - 5/5