November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 33
That line would sit easily on the lips of Arthur Fleck,
who is pure neediness, all jutting rib-cage and exposed
nerve endings. But it doesn’t sound very much like Phoe-
nix. Vulnerable though he often appears, he has seemed
never to want anything from the audience, least of all
their approval. It has been said that he only connected
with the part of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (2005) once
he was told (rightly or wrongly) that ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’,
the Bob Dylan song that Cash positively spits into the mi-
crophone, was written from the point of view of an idol
addressing his adoring fans: “I’m not the one you want,
babe / I will only let you down.” That sounds more like it.
That’s very Joaquin Phoenix.
It’s not that he isn’t dependable. He may have consent-
ed to half-baked films – most recently Woody Allen’s
Irrational Man (2015), where he tapped for the first time
into a latent air of superiority to play an amoral professor
- but you can never accuse him of a poor or uncommit-
ted performance. Rather, it is the whims or enthusiasms
of fans and critics that appear to set his teeth on edge, and
which act on him like a depressant. Wasn’t the point of
I’m Still Here to reject all that, to start again, to push away
the admirers with their stifling expectations and not
only court ridicule but embrace it, kiss it, dive into it?
As this suggests, it is his proximity to the absurd, and
to outright and cataclysmic failure, that defines Phoe-
nix’s finest work. There used to be a germ of self-loathing
at the heart of his acting: “The reason why I keep making
movies is ’cos I hate the last thing I did,” he said in 1999.
“I’m always trying to rectify my wrongs.” Nearly 20 years
later, he had moderated his tune if not quite changed it:
“The great thing about film is that you get to make mis-
takes,” he said last year. James Gray has noted the change,
and the improvement, in the two decades they have been
making movies together: back when they shot The Yards
in 2000, he has said, “[Phoenix] didn’t have full control
of his instrument. He was like an Olympic diver who
didn’t know the formal rules of the Olympics yet.” After
that, “he began to understand, frankly, that there weren’t
limits, and he started to become fearless”. The livid, lapel-
grabbing, Francis Bacon-esque character studies such as
Joker, The Master and You Were Never Really Here may
inevitably attract the most attention, but the level of
nuance in some of his gentler performances – in Gray’s
Two Lovers, where he plays a suicidal introvert still living
with his parents yet not quite ready to relinquish hope,
and in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), as a lonely office worker
who falls in love with his computer operating system – is
just as deserving of study.
He couldn’t have played Freddie Quell in The Master
had he not acquired that fearlessness Gray talks about.
No actor afraid of mockery would have adopted that
lumbering physicality, the shoulders bent so far forward
that they almost clink together under his chin, or those
blasts of corrosive laughter which explode from one
side of his mouth, while the other side is clamped shut,
rendering his speech almost incomprehensible. As the
private eye ‘Doc’ Sportello in Inherent Vice, he goes to the
other extreme, not sinking into brute inarticulacy but
advertising every internal outlandish reaction. It’s one
of US cinema’s most joyously cartoon-like performanc-
es – like Jim Carrey in The Mask (1994), only without
the aid of CGI. (It helps to think of the movie as a live-
action Looney Tunes: no wonder people keep asking,
“What’s up, Doc?”) Wacky physical asides hidden from
the rest of the characters provide the equivalent of an in-
terior monologue to which only the audience has access.
Being the more high-minded of the two Anderson films,
The Master was always going to be the better re-
garded, but both performances show Phoenix
REX FEATURES (1)
His Doc
Sportello in
‘Inherent
Vice’ is one of
US cinema’s
most joyously
cartoon-like
performances –
like Jim Carrey
in ‘The Mask’,
without CGI
JOAQUIN PHOENIX SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Parenthood
(Ron Howard, 1989)
To Die For
(Gus Van Sant, 1995)
Inventing
the Abbotts
(Pat O’Connor, 1997)
U Turn
(Oliver Stone, 1997)
Clay Pigeons
(David Dobkin, 1998)
Return to Paradise
(Joseph Ruben, 1998)
8mm
(Joel Schumacher, 1999)
The Yards
(James Gray, 2000)
Gladiator (pictured)
(Ridley Scott, 2000)
Quills
(Philip Kaufman, 2000)
Buffalo Soldiers
(Gregor Jordan, 2001)
Signs
(M. Night Shyamalan, 2002)
It’s All About Love
(Thomas Vinterberg, 2003)
The Village
(M. Night Shyamalan, 2004)
Walk the Line
(James Mangold, 2005)
We Own the Night
(James Gray, 2007)
Two Lovers
(James Gray, 2008)
I’m Still Here
(Casey Affleck, 2010)
The Master
(Paul Thomas
Anderson, 2012)
The Immigrant
(James Gray, 2013)
Her
(Spike Jonze, 2013)
Inherent Vice
(Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Irrational Man
(Woody Allen, 2015)
You Were Never
Really Here
(Lynne Ramsay, 2017)
Don’t Worry, He Won’t
Get Far on Foot
(Gus Van Sant, 2018)
Mary Magdalene
(Garth Davis, 2018)
The Sisters Brothers
(Jacques Audiard, 2018)
Joker
(Todd Phillips, 2019)
“I’ve worked with some amazing
actors, but [Joaquin], in particular,
was always questioning, always
digging deeper, sometimes
driving me crazy, and we tried
to smash up anything that felt
like a cliché. It’s all about the
work, not the bullshit around it...
We talked about trying
to make something really
exciting and compulsive and
intense but at the same time
to strip everything back. He
would never do the same
thing twice, he was entirely
exciting to work with.”
Lynne Ramsay on directing Phoenix in
2017’s ‘You Were Never Really Here’
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Joker, 4
