34 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
JOAQUIN PHOENIX JOKER
mapping out and inhabiting a physical world
through performance.
His willingness to be laughed at sets him apart from
his peers, and it’s one of the reasons that Arthur Fleck is
such a perfect role for him, demanding as it does an actor
who doesn’t distinguish noticeably between comedy and
horror. Perhaps that’s how he has come to tolerate, or ra-
tionalise, the same excesses of Hollywood against which
he once railed. “Joaquin Phoenix isn’t here tonight,” an-
nounced Tina Fey at the Golden Globes in 2015, “because
he has said publicly that awards shows are ‘total and utter
bullshit’ – oh, hey Joaquin! There he is.” Cut to Phoenix,
with that familiar smile, half shameless, half sheepish.
It has become quite the sport to look out for him in
the audience at these shows. Not because he is bound to
win (that rarely happens, though Joker will surely change
all that) but because there is a feeling that he has made
peace with the self-congratulatory tendencies of a profes-
sion that has in the past caused him visible discomfort,
and is able to do great work nevertheless. At the Indepen-
dent Spirit Awards earlier this year, the host Aubrey Plaza
looked out into the crowd and said: “Joaquin Phoenix is
here from his ‘Beard’ trilogy: I’m Still Here, You Were Never
Really Here and the upcoming Sir, You Cannot Sleep Here.”
Cue another cutaway to the Phoenix grin. Comedy is
never far from even his most serious performances, so
it’s no wonder there was widespread laughter at an in-
dustry showcase I attended a few years back, where early
footage from Mary Magdalene (2018) included the an-
nouncement: “And starring Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus!”
There was something so comically right and incongru-
ous and pompously Hollywood about the idea of the son
of God being played by a man who once fell off the stage
while rapping in Las Vegas. (Sadly, the movie turned out
not to be a joke.)
It’s a sign of how far Phoenix has come that there is
scarcely any need now to print his name phonetically
(see everything written about him until 2010) or to
point out that his family fled the religious cult Children
of God and drew appreciative crowds by busking and
dancing on the streets, or that several of his siblings pur-
sued successful acting careers – the Guardian referred to
them in 1997 as “Birkenstock Barrymores” and in 2018 as
“Haight-Ashbury von Trapps”. Plenty of serious admirers
of his acting don’t even know that he had a spectacularly
gifted older brother, River Phoenix, whose death from a
drug overdose he witnessed in 1993, and whose career it
seemed for the longest time Joaquin would struggle to
outstrip. The brothers have their similarities. Both exhib-
ited a flashpoint intensity, able to turn on a dime from
larky to electrifying, and both have had Richard Harris as
a screen father (River in Sam Shepard’s 1993 Silent Tongue,
Joaquin in Gladiator). There’s a nice irony in the fact that
it was River who lured Joaquin back from his first retire-
ment by forcing him to watch repeatedly a VHS copy
of Raging Bull (1980) – and that it is now Robert De Niro
who not only provides one of the main inspirations for
Joker but who also stars in the movie as an unctuous TV
host Arthur idolises.
But Phoenix has a quality that even De Niro lacks: a
willingness, even a compulsion, to skate on the brink of
the ridiculous. It’s no stretch to hold Phoenix in the same
high regard as Daniel Day-Lewis, another two-time Paul
Thomas Anderson leading man, and Joker proves every
bit as much as his bestial, rampaging work in The Master
that he is Day-Lewis’s equal in emotional and physical
rigour. The one element that sets him apart from the
senior actor, though, is his willingness to mess up. He’s
Marina Abramovic with a beard, the man Shia LaBeouf
dreams of being, Christian Bale with a sense of humour,
and the nearest A-list acting will ever get to Andy
Kaufman. If De Niro and Day-Lewis walk the tightrope,
Phoenix does so with his trousers down and egg on his
face. In Joker, he dares us not only to laugh but to push
beyond that response, to the fear that lurks behind it.
Joker is out now in UK cinemas
PHOENIX RISING
(Above, from left) Joaquin
Phoenix as a nightclub
manager turned cop, with
Eva Mendes, in We Own
the Night (2007); as a
philosophy professor in
Irrational Man (2015); as
Johnny Cash in Walk the Line
(2005); and as World War
II vet Freddie Quell in The
Master (2012)
REX FEATURES (1)
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