A “Joker” for the Age of Trump

I finally watched “Joker” the other night. It met my expectations. And now — after making a billion dollars at the box office — it’s been nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. So, what the hell, let’s blame Trump, or whatever it is that created Trump.

Two things put me off seeing “Joker” in a theater.

1: I don’t have much interest in purely fictional psycho killer movies. I mean “Psycho” was terrific. But it took its time getting to Tony Perkins. He wasn’t set up as the ghoulish, fully gratuitous lodge pole of the entire picture.

And 2: I generally despise comic book movies. To be blunt, they’re simple-minded and adolescent. Which is fine if you’re both of those things. But not being a 14 year-old, cos-playing fan boy, capes, tights and wall-to-wall CGI action fail to move me to anything other than boredom.

Yet here was, quite clearly, a cultural phenomenon. Literally millions of people turned out to see “Joker”, likely as attracted by its connection to Batman as I was repelled. Then word got out about how “brilliant” Joaquin Phoenix was as the genuinely mentally disturbed main character, Arthur Fleck, a hapless punching bag for pretty much everyone in his orbit. Plenty of critics said “no thanks” to the whole grim adventure. But prizes were nevertheless won at prestigious film festivals.

It’s been maybe 50 years since I placed any great credibility in the movie industry’s notion of “art” or “best”. When “Oliver!” beat out “2001: A Space Odyssey”, (which wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture), it was an early lesson for little, young me that the voters in the movie business are mainly about their business — who they worked with, who they know and like, who they want to work for — and not about the side of filmmaking that thoroughly invested in the interweaving of art and imagination.

Hollywood 2020 isn’t so different, even with all the attention and effort given to bringing in younger and more diverse voters. A truly good film like “Moonlight” was likely lifted up as much by the movie industry’s “woke” culture as the film community’s appreciation of its storytelling and craftsmanship. This “wokeness” was even more evident with last year’s winner, “The Green Book”. (The movie business was very hinky about lending too much weight and credibility to Netflix and “Roma”.)

And now, “Joker”. A billion dollar winner at the box office, and with serious adults talking about how it isn’t just a comic bok movie. About how it really has something important to say about our cultural moment. To which I say, “Like what exactly?”

That damaged-in-youth, mistreated-through-life “losers” are a potential danger to their families, themselves and us? While I find it hard to disagree, I fail to see the fresh insight into the issue in a movie that depends on a connection to a more or less dystopian comic book to find its place on the stage of our times.

Phoenix does startling work as Arthur Fleck, and will almost certainly win Best Actor. But I gotta tell ya, as someone who has spent more time than I should have watching movies and chatting up actors over the years, I’ve long since stopped thinking playing a nutjob is difficult work. For an actor, playing crazy is like a horse on the open range. The reins are off. It’s remarkably feeing. A patently crazy character has no connections to any familiar parameters with which audiences can judge good acting from bad. I mean, the guy’s crazy! An actor can pretty much take that anywhere he and the director want to go. There’s no good way to measure it as “real” or bona fide.

Along with the stunning box office numbers, my guess is that Academy voters see “Joker” as a tap into the Trump-era zeitgeist. (“Zeitgeist” being one of those words you always need to drop to convince readers you’re smarter than you are.)

Here, in Arthur Fleck, a piece of human detritus, someone both abused and forgotten in a fundamentally corrupt society, controlled and exploited by the uber-wealthy. (Enter young Bruce “Batman” Wayne and his mega-macher father.)

We’ve watched these sad wretches go homicidal. Hell, a guy like Arthur shot up a movie theater playing a Batman movie a few years ago in Denver. Therefore, if you’re keeping score at home, “Joker” is a provocative comment on our ugly, abusive times … or … maybe only if you really want it to be.

My view, slumped in my chair watching on iTunes, was closer to “slick, crass exploitation.” As someone somewhere has already written, “Joker” is a variation on “Taxi Driver” for an era that wants its cultural commentary reduced to the wholly literal simplicity of a comic book.

If a mirror to the era of Trump is something you’re looking for, “Bombshell”, has far more relevance than “Joker.” And if you’re a film lover looking for where “art” meets “best”, track down “A Hidden Life” … which hasn’t been nominated for anything … and has a lot to say about our moral obligations in an era of corruption.

#Oscars So Sappy

Before I refill my popcorn bowl for six hours-plus of Michael Cohen Live! tomorrow in DC, I have to hammer that “Green Book” Best Picture nail, like pretty much everyone else already has.

As a life-long movie fan, and as someone who (he says smugly) believes movies can be art, I assure you with near 100% certainty that 10 years from now “Green Book” will be yet another all-but-forgotten example of Hollywood sentimentality while “Roma” will still be regarded as one of the 50 finest movies of this era. This year, among the Best Picture nominees, based on the marriage of artistic expression and technical craft, on the breadth and depth of human fears, aspirations, motivations and desires — on how life is lived — there was “Roma” and then there was everything else.

Critics and fans who, like me blurted out “Are you [bleeping] kidding me!?” when Julia Roberts announced Best Picture, have had this experience before … many times. (And let’s not forget 1969 when “Oliver!” won and “2001” wasn’t even nominated. Or 1977, when “Rocky” beat out “Network.”) There’s a deep, sappy strain of treacly, middle-brow do-gooderism that has always run through Hollywood.

But I mean, let’s be real, the movie industry is a business based on selling the most tickets it possibly can. Cut the widest path into mass appeal. Art is fine, popular is much better. Hollywood’s self-satisfying liberal neurons get all fired up and excited at the thought of giving the world’s ticket buyers a big, glamorous demonstration of what it believes the world wants to see … in Hollywood’s values.

The rub of course is that the Oscars are handed out by The Motion Picture Academy of ARTS and SCIENCES, which kinda, sorta implies that its big awards show exists to salute and commend the best of the cinematic “art”, as well as the “sciences” that help convey artistic expression to the masses. It shouldn’t matter whether “the best” sold 100 million tickets or 100,000.

But it does.

Before the telecast there was lots of talk about the minefield of screw-ups this year’s glitzy pageant was blundering through. No host! Cratering ratings! How about an Oscar for Best Popular Movie? How about handing out a few of the dull awards during commercial breaks?

Speaking of minefields, in the era of “Oscars So White”, #MeToo and #TimesUp, the Academy’s clear and almost comical determination to inoculate itself against any new charges of racial or gender insensitivity likely contributed to “Green Book’s” disproportionate appeal. I mean, as I watched the parade of remarkably diverse presenters, I had to wonder if guys like Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Tom Cruise had had their SAG cards pulled.

Distilled to its essence, all those controversies were rooted in the Prime Directive of the Academy Awards — namely: put on a TV show that gets bigly ratings. (As though either the Academy or ABC/Disney would be lining up at a food shelf if the Oscarcast audience slides below 40 million.) The niggling question of whether the nominated movies were truly the year’s most artistic or most technically creative wasn’t really on the radar.

But this is really deep same-old, same-old.

The Oscar telecast has always felt more like a mash-up of Broadway and dinner theater than an event unabashedly devoted to movies. It’s (another) celebrity fashion show, with an orchestra, lots of interruptions for singing and dancing, a couple of snarky jokes and, of course, if we’re lucky, moments of bona fide apex Hollywood. (Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Now that’s what you call “puttin’ on a show”, folks.)

But the show itself — an event supposedly all about commending the best of the year in movie making — is forever incapable of devoting itself top filmmaking. It can’t even bring itself to describe to its massive international audience how movie art is made great, or even “artful”. This year’s show for example devoted easily 10 times as much of its hyper-super valuable airtime to Best Song nominees than examples of the year’s best editing or cinematography.

You tell me which is more core to the essential heart of movie-making.