Monday new releases: 7 October 2024

There’s some unseemly glee among my inter­na­tion­al col­leagues about the box office fate of the new Joker movie. Based on the open­ing week­end, estim­ates are that it will end up with a the­at­ric­al gross of less than 25 per­cent of the ori­gin­al on a budget almost four times as big.

Sure, that’s got to hurt for what many still mis­takenly con­sider to be just a com­ic book movie, but I take no pleas­ure in films not find­ing an audi­ence while cinemas are strug­gling to stay afloat. When we lose a pic­ture theatre – like the Paramount close to home – chances are we nev­er get them back.

But I can’t help but feel that there is some karma in effect this time – that Warner Bros. Discovery is suf­fer­ing because, on one hand, they’ve allowed the sac­red Looney Tunes logo and music to be used for the open­ing anim­ated flash­back sequence in Folies à Deux, while at the same time – in an act of breath­tak­ing cor­por­ate hypo­crisy – the brains trust at the stu­dio chose to trash Coyote vs. Acme for the tax write-off rather than release it.1

So, what to make of Joker: Folie à Deux, then. A sequel to the phe­nom­en­ally suc­cess­ful gritty reima­gin­ing of the DC com­ics supervil­lain ori­gin story – a film that won Oscars for Joaquin Phoenix (Best Actor) and Hildur Guðnadóttir (Best Score) – it takes two big swerves away into a new dir­ec­tion. It intro­duces Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel, some actu­al love interest for Phoenix’s lonely mon­ster Arthur Fleck. And the film­makers decided to illus­trate the inner lives of the char­ac­ters, and their rela­tion­ship, by giv­ing them songs to sing and dance to.

I don’t have a prob­lem with any of that, at least con­cep­tu­ally. I can also accept those set-pieces being long and unex­cit­ing as them­at­ic­ally appro­pri­ate, even while I’m check­ing my watch.

I finally watched Joker for the first time this week­end and prox­im­ity, I think, makes the pair more inter­est­ing than I expec­ted. This is a pair of films that tries to por­tray men­tal ill­ness, and society’s cava­lier atti­tude towards it, with some sympathy.

The new movie is about con­sequences and Arthur Fleck/Joker is about to go to tri­al for his crimes. His law­yer, played by Catherine Keener, is determ­ined that proof of men­tal inca­pa­city will keep him from the death pen­alty and urges him to play up that aspect of his story.

But, of course, both sides of the argu­ment can be true at the same time. Joker was clearly insane at the end of the first film but the Arthur Fleck we meet in Arkham Asylum at the begin­ning of part two knows what he has done and seems pre­pared to accept his fate. All of this is helped tre­mend­ously by Phoenix’s com­pas­sion­ate com­mit­ment to both truths.

It’s the arrival of Quinzel that tips Fleck over the edge once more, an example of both films’ deep-seated miso­gyny as she turns out to be a tox­ic com­bin­a­tion of super-fan and manip­u­lat­ive gold-digger.

This morn­ing I read this ter­rif­ic art­icle in the Spinoff about New Zealand’s inad­equate care for those suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness and how eas­ily people can fall through the cracks of a well-intentioned sys­tem. I found myself think­ing about Phoenix as Fleck and his por­trait of an abused and trau­mat­ised, lonely little boy turned into a lonely little man.

I’m prob­ably read­ing too much into this but I do think, once all the fuss about the box office and how audi­ences don’t want music­als has died down, we might find that there is more to these two films than meets the eye, even though dir­ect­or Todd Phillips and co-screenwriter Scott Silver do lay it all on a bit thick. Sadly, this Joker over­plays its hand.

Even the best films can fall prey to spelling things out a bit too obvi­ously at times. In Nora Fingscheidt’s adapt­a­tion of Amy Liptrot’s mem­oir The Outrun, the cent­ral char­ac­ter melts down at one point because she can’t find the tiny com­pass neck­lace her fath­er once gave her. Yes, we get it. She’s lost her com­pass. She’s lost her way. But we could see that per­fectly clearly through­out, thanks to an astound­ing per­form­ance from Saoirse Ronan as recov­er­ing alco­hol­ic Rona, and a script (by Liptrot and Fingscheidt) that deftly moves back­wards and for­wards in time to show us Rona’s des­cent and fra­gile rebound.

She has moved from the Orkneys, north of Scotland, to London – largely to escape the pres­sures of her par­ents’ broken rela­tion­ship. Her fath­er (Stephen. Dillane) is in and out of care for his bipolar dis­order and her moth­er (Saskia Reeves) has ded­ic­ated her­self to God.

After hit­ting the low­est of low points – the film is unspar­ing in this regard – Rona returns home and attempts to main­tain her sobri­ety with the help of the islands them­selves – the land, the birds and the stories.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Another of the meta­phors that the film leans on is that of migra­tion and return. Rona has a job look­ing for evid­ence of the endangered Corncrake, a bird that flies as far south as Africa each winter before return­ing to the islands. Rather, only 30 per­cent do. Rona hopes that her odds are a bit bet­ter than that.

One of many things that I grudgingly admit Australia does bet­ter than us is that they have a Children’s Television Foundation. For 42 years they’ve been a voice and a resource for qual­ity media for small humans and I wish we had some­thing like it.

They were a con­trib­ut­or to the devel­op­ment of Runt, an old fash­ioned fam­ily film set in coun­try Australia, and it’s a film that’s happy to trade in – and con­trib­ute to –that mythology.

Ten-year-old Western Australian Annie Shearer (Lily LaTorre) adopts a stray dog called Runt and decides that, if Runt can win the loc­al Canine Agility con­test, she can put the money towards help­ing the fam­ily sur­vive the long drought.

The town­ship of Upson Downs isn’t just dry because of the lack of rain, it’s also because loc­al water hoarder Earl Robert-Barren2 (Jack Thompson) has damned the reservoir.

In a very Australian touch, all the vil­lains in this film demon­strate their wicked­ness by demand­ing people fol­low the let­ter of the law – all ‘art­icle this’, ‘sub-section that’ and ‘clause the oth­er’ – and its the healthy dis­respect for author­ity that wins the day.

There are some very big per­form­ances in Runt, but an even big­ger heart, and it has a Paul Kelly song over the clos­ing cred­its so what’s not to enjoy.

A couple of years ago, a great friend of comedi­an Will Ferrell – and a former Saturday Night Live col­league – announced that he was trans­ition­ing at the age of 60 and, hence­forth would be known as Harper. In the film Will & Harper, the two take a road trip across America attempt­ing to see wheth­er ordin­ary Americans will accept Harper and her great love of greasy diners, dive bars, cheap beer and basketball.

In oth­er words, can Harper still be essen­tially the same per­son she used to be while at the same time being a com­pletely dif­fer­ent one.

Sometimes the film verges on Borat ter­rit­ory – will these red­necks run the lib­er­al film crew out of town? – but it nev­er quite gets there and is often quite the opposite.

While the film isn’t nearly as curi­ous about Harper’s life and decision as it might be, it does con­firm that Ferrell is a com­plete mensch and, as a por­trait of a long friend­ship, it can often be quite moving.

At my age, I don’t ima­gine I’ll be mak­ing many more 35-year friend­ships so the ones I have are pre­cious to me and the film sug­gests that I shouldn’t wait for my friends to make life-changing decisions in order for us to spend qual­ity time together.