32 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
JOAQUIN PHOENIX JOKER
across the world by posing, Trojan horse-style, as
a comic-book origin story. And yes, it is that – the
director Todd Phillips matches up the end of the movie,
more or less, to the flashbacks in Tim Burton’s 1989
Batman. More notable is how fully the picture is steered
by Phoenix’s qualities and range, as well as his need to
roam beyond them with every performance. “Our goal
was never to introduce Joaquin Phoenix to the comic-
book universe,” Phillips has said, “but to introduce
comic-book movies to the Joaquin Phoenix universe.”
Mission accomplished. Even after having made the
movie, Phoenix remains distinct from, and splendidly
oblivious to, the implications of appearing in a product
with comic-book roots. Asked by Dave Itzkoff of the
New York Times whether it was a bad sign for cinema
that character-driven movies can only get made if they
contain some pre-sold pop-culture hook, he growled: “I
don’t even know what you just said.”
It’s telling that Shyamalan chose the word ‘actor’ in
his 2002 prediction, perhaps knowing even then that
Phoenix would never countenance the level of surrender
necessary to become a ‘star’. Physically, he is too mutable
and enigmatic to succumb to stardom. His physiognomy
is a puzzle. To gaze at Tom Cruise or Will Smith is to be
reassured by symmetry; to look upon Phoenix, with his
Mount Rushmore brow, hyper-intense X-ray stare and
nose like a falling arrow is to be confronted with dramat-
ic and infinite riddles. The critic Anthony Lane wrote in
the New Yorker of the “tense, oddly compacted expres-
sion on his face, as if his head were caught in an invisible
vice”. Gray has described Phoenix as “ambiguous, good-
looking but slightly off-centre, with a tragic quality” and
has noted his “inner Beelzebub” – which Joker has now
surely coaxed into the open.
Like any serious actor worth his salt – and his sugar –
he has piled on the pounds with no thought for vanity. In
Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, the camera
admires his bare unruly bulk and finds unspoken stories
in his gone-to-seed flesh. Many of his films make room
for that moment when he unveils the particular body
he has arrived at this time around. (It’s the equivalent of
hearing a new Meryl Streep accent.) The convention was
started by To Die For, in which the camera moves down
Phoenix’s torso and then hovers tantalisingly over his
navel; as the critic Adam Mars-Jones pointed out in the
Independent, “It looks like shorthand – that’s as much
as we can show you, folks – until you realise that the
camera finds Phoenix’s tensed midriff rewarding in its
own right.” He strips in broad daylight during a clandes-
tine meeting in The Yards – what better way for a crimi-
nal to prove he’s not wearing a wire? – and Joker, too, has
its share of shirtless shots that testify to his dedication in
the area of weight-loss: he makes the Pale Man from Pan’s
Labyrinth (2006) look like a Calvin Klein model.
Watching Phoenix as the emperor Commodus in dai-
lies for Gladiator (2000), Ridley Scott famously exclaimed:
“Fuck, you got fat!” But he can be strikingly graceful too.
In Joker, he keeps breaking out into dance routines; on a
flight of concrete stairs, he negotiates each one with the
liquid elegance of a Slinky, and performs a soft-shoe shuf-
fle on a subway platform while a cop is beaten to death in
front of him. In a scene near the start of We Own the Night,
he somehow manoeuvres himself out from behind the
wheel of a car, across the passenger seat, through the
window and on to the pavement in one seamless move-
ment; the effect is like watching tequila magically pour-
ing itself from the bottle.
More than 30 years as an actor should be enough time
to have tamed his eccentricities and sanded down his
abrasiveness. But it hasn’t. At the time of writing, it has
just been reported that he walked out of an interview
with the Daily Telegraph in response to a question about
whether the violence in Joker, connected as it is to a social
movement of spurned and resentful men, might inspire
copycat behaviour. Stars don’t storm out of interviews:
they turn up early to premieres to kiss babies and take
selfies. Nor do they mislead and obfuscate, whether it’s
on the grand scale of I’m Still Here or the more mundane
one of fabricating biographical details. Phoenix has pub-
licly announced two engagements in his life, one real (he
is currently engaged to the actor Rooney Mara) and one
fake: in 2015, he let slip that he had recently proposed
marriage to his girlfriend. Asked some months later why
he had lied about this, he explained: “I wanted the audi-
ence to like me. And they always like you when you get
engaged. Everyone applauds.”
Vulnerable
though Phoenix
often appears,
he has seemed
never to want
anything from
the audience,
least of all
their approval
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Joaquin Phoenix
(above, from left) as a
version of himself in the
mockumentary I’m Still Here
(2010); as the traumatised
hitman in You Were Never
Really Here (2017); as the
lonely protagonist of Her
(2015), and (opposite) as
private eye ‘Doc’ Sportello in
Inherent Vice (2014)
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
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Joker, 3
