Review: Joker is a powerful portrayal of a troubled man’s descent into madness

Enlarge / A villain is born: Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) prepares for his grand entrance. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Joaquin Phoenix turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as a failed stand-up comedian struggling with mental illness in Joker, Director Todd Phillips' controversial interpretation of the classic Batman villain. The film won the coveted Golden Lion when it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in August and raked in an impressive $247 million globally in its opening weekend. It deserves every bit of that success.

Joker is intended as a standalone film—part of DC Films' decision to move away from the shared-universe approach of their prior franchise films (aka, the Marvel model). So it has no relation to the Justice League films that came before. That freed Phillips to create his own darker, gritty version of this iconic character, with a comparatively modest budget of $55 million. There's no real origin story for the Joker in the comics—not a definitive one, anyway—so Phillips and screenwriter Scott Silver were able to cherry-pick the canonical elements they needed and make up the rest. (In Batman: The Killing Joke, for instance, the Joker is a failed comedian.)

(Some spoilers below.)

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