For the week of January 6th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Todd Phillips' controversial comic-book drama Joker to Blu-ray. If there's a reason to see Joker - and you should see Joker - it's because of Joaquin Phoenix. As Arthur Fleck, a cognitively disabled street clown and failing standup comic, Phoenix is an open pit of neglect and anxiety, simultaneously desperate for affection and incapable of processing it. His laugh - the Joker's laugh - is now a neurological condition. When Arthur is overwhelmed with emotion, he literally laughs so he doesn't cry, his body convulsing in weeping spasms of hysteria, so much so that he carries a card explaining his condition to put strangers at ease (spoiler: it doesn't work). Phoenix is almost unwatchably good, so palpable does he make Arthur's living agony, and the fact that mainstream audiences are encountering a performance this uncompromising and rich and strange makes me appreciate Joker more in retrospect. Plus, when he goes full Joker in the film's final third, Phoenix proves adept at wielding his bizarre idiosyncrasies like an operatic tenor. Near the end of the film, Arthur surveys a Gotham City-wide riot that he's helped create, and he's so overcome with joy that he uses the blood from a cut to paint a gory rictus smile across his face. The moment is revolting - at no point does the film's text or subtext code Joker's actions as aspirational. It is Phoenix who makes Joker feel psychologically outsized, who gives it these wrenching little insights into mental illness, class inequality, and toxic masculinity. And his integrity clashes with the film around him. As a piece of technical filmmaking, Joker is superb. Phillips creates this stylish, alienating world of dread and misery. Certainly we must also credit Lawrence Sher (Phillips' longtime director of photography), production designer Mark Friedberg, and composer Hildur Guđnadóttir, whose foreboding, cello-centric score is as menacing as anything Phoenix does. But here's the thing: Phillips has a pretty solid cheat sheet, and I'm not talking about the script that he co-wrote with Scott Silver. No, Joker feels less like a movie than a full-on cinematic mash note to director Martin Scorsese. Arthur Fleck stalks around Gotham with the same alienated register as Travis Bickle in Scorsese's Taxi Driver; his obsession with late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin (a nicely understated Robert De Niro) strongly recalls Rupert Pupkin's focus on Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy. After a point, I kept waiting for Joker to deliver anything other than skillful homage, but only Phoenix offers a shock of the new. That very quality makes the film so maddening and vital to discuss. It is an arresting feature, filled with images that linger and a lead performance that excoriates anything we expect from a traditional comic-book movie. It's also shallow and glib and socially indifferent, and it's way more interested in comic-book franchise building than it lets on. As humans, we're capable of holding two diametrically opposed ideas in our heads, if need be. In the case of Joker, the longer we do, the more it all falls apart. That's the sort of chaos that might make even the Clown Prince of Crime bristle.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that "a more cynical version of myself might even call it "Taxi Driver for dummies," as it takes a number of lazy narrative shortcuts to drum up sympathy for it main character. Yet Joker remains more than just a compelling character study: it's truly well-crafted and has extremely strong technical merits, looking almost as good as Christopher Nolan's Batman films - despite being shot digitally and on a much more intimate scale - with an outstanding original score that provides a perfectly dark and somber backdrop. The sudden outbursts of violence and volatile third act earn Joker a rare "R" rating for its genre - and while I am not 100% on board with the film's message or politics (especially given America's current social climate), Joker feels no more out-of-character here than he does in The Killing Joke, A Death in the Family, or The Dark Knight. Of course, that's not even taking another important thing into account: Arthur Fleck is clearly an unreliable narrator, so there's the distinct possibility that not everything is as it seems."
In many ways, The Lighthouse - which arrives this week courtesy of A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment - is just as chaotic a feature. Although marketed as a horror film, writer/director Robert Eggers' follow-up to his acclaimed The Witch functions as a surrealist comedy, like some unholy script collaboration between Herman Melville and Samuel Beckett. If Vladimir and Estragon tippled into an existential quandary while waiting for Godot, then Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson's lighthouse keepers have even less direction and even more psychological ennui. It's some time in the late nineteenth century, and they've been tasked with maintaining a desolate island lighthouse off the coast of New England. Dafoe (who is basically playing Captain McAllister from The Simpsons) pulls rank whenever he can, whether that's making Pattinson maintain the septic system during the day or forcing him to drink during their nightly meals. And Pattinson approaches every task with this wary misanthropy, like he's almost daring Dafoe to ask personal questions he'll never answer. A series of strange and fantastic occurrences begin to accumulate, some real (like Pattinson's horrible murder of an irritating sea gull), and some...probably less than real (the various mermaid sightings across the island). The lighthouse relief party never comes. The two men lose track of time. And as they grow progressively drunker and madder, both Dafoe and Pattinson begin to ascribe some dread and unholy power to the lighthouse itself. In the wrong hands, such a tale could take on a brutalist, doomed tenor, and certainly the monochrome, narrow cinematography (by Eggers' DP Jarin Blaschke) lends the film the claustrophobic tenor of a nightmare. Yet Eggers maintains this incredible lightness of spirit. As twisted as things get, The Lighthouse is deeply, consistently funny. There's a sexual undercurrent to Pattinson's mania that's both unnerving and absurd (let's just say he develops a thing for mermaids), and Dafoe has this rage that veers crazily from anger to insecure despair - I don't think I've laughed harder at anything in a movie this year than when an on-the-verge-of-sobbing Dafoe bellows, "But I thought ye liked me lobster?" I'm not sure what it all means. The ideological struggle between boomers and millennials? The need for purpose in a world sadly lacking in such? Maybe nothing at all? But even if The Lighthouse is just an excuse for hipster-ready memes (a friend of mine said it played like "the A24 version of Mandy"), I have such a ball luxuriating in the film's mordant delights that I don't much care.
From Kino Lorber comes one of the great debut features of recent years: Rian Johnson's 2005 neo-noir Brick. It might be tempting to overlook this one now that Johnson has grown into a blockbuster director of considerable style and taste (he made the most controversial four-quadrant adventure of the 21st Century; he designed a Poirot-adjacent mystery more engaging than Kenneth Branagh's actual Poirot vehicle; he got Bruce Willis to wake up and stop grumbling on camera), yet Brick contains all the elements that would come to define Johnson's later features. He loves genre - that much is true - and Brick fits comfortably into a well-worn one: the hardboiled detective mystery. A woman (Emilie de Ravin) has gone missing, thus sending her former lover Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) on a labyrinthine quest through a menagerie of lowlifes and brigands. But uncovering the truth surrounding her disappearance has its own attendant perils, especially once Brendan starts drawing close to a drug kingpin (Lukas Haas) with his fingers in most local criminal enterprises. Brick is chock-full of femme fatales (Nora Zehetner and Meagan Good play two especially notable ones) and violent psychopaths (like Noah Segan's brutish Dode) and shocking twists, one of which culminates in a moment of violence that I've still never forgotten. The film would fit nicely alongside classic '40s noirs like Murder, My Sweet or even something more nihilistic, like the 1975 classic Night Moves. But if you know Johnson's work, you know that he's not simply interested in replicating the past. He wants to deconstruct all the old tropes and see what makes them work. In the case of Brick, he does so with a conceit that couldn't have seemed more novel at the time: he roots this mystery in high school. Brendan is a angsty loner who doesn't get along with the weirdoes or the popular kids, and when he gets a dressing-down for interfering in this case, it's from his school principal (Shaft himself, the great Richard Roundtree). Johnson uses his characters' relative youth (even Haas's criminal mastermind can't be more than 23 or 24) to both heighten the drama (kids always think in terms of life-or-death stakes) and underscore how silly it all is, and in a manner that still lets us connect with the narrative. He's a wonder, that Rian Johnson. They should give him a Star War or something to direct.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a Blu-ray version of George Cukor's sparkling 1938 romance Holiday. Of the three Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant rom-coms (the other two are Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story), Holiday doesn't enjoy the same canonical reverence. If ever a movie starring these two could be called "forgotten," it would be this one. And that's a shame: Holiday might lack the screwball dynamics of Bringing Up Baby or the seamless professionalism of The Philadelphia Story, but it's a far more affecting, thoughtful piece of work than the other two. The setup is, admittedly, pretty sweaty. We meet Cary Grant's Johnny Case mere hours afters he's proposed to Doris Nolan's beautiful heiress Julia, except he's so charming and she's so stuffy that we don't come close to buying them as a couple, particularly once Julia introduces Johnny to her quirky older sister Linda (Hepburn). This is a Hollywood fantasy, after all, and you don't cast Grant and Hepburn together unless you're going to have them fall madly in love by the end credits. But like a Nancy Meyers picture, the labored first act gives way to some of the wittiest and most emotionally mature banter that I've ever seen. Johnny is a future Master of the Universe, only he'd rather die than give his life over to finance - he wants to make just enough money to buy himself out of the rat race and figure out who he is and what he cares about. And Linda is looking to make a human connection outside of the strict societal mores that dictate her rich family. Most of the film takes place in Linda's "playroom," a cramped warren filled with books, toys, and musical instruments that represent all the pleasures her family denies itself in search of status and wealth. As she and Johnny discuss their ideal existence (a "holiday" away from all the world's expectations), not only do they draw closer to one another, but they also promote a social agenda that was downright subversive for 1938. To wit: while most studio pictures from that era promote glamour and material accomplishment, Holiday advocates in favor of burning it all down and following a path of Emersonian self-reflection. Cukor and his screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman makes their points oh-so-sweetly and with elegant reserve, sure, but their criticism of the rich is still biting. Nolan is pretty but vapid; her father (Henry Kolker) is a ruthless pragmatist laser-focused on the bottom line (in a nice running gag, whenever he tries to connect with anyone, he robotically remarks on the weather and the seeming lack/surplus of snow); and her brother (Lew Ayres, the film's stealth MVP) has adopted alcoholism as a kind of armor against all the things he hates about his lineage. The magic trick of Holiday is that we don't just want Hepburn and Grant to get together because they're Hepburn and Grant - we want them to get together because their union reflects a better way of life. I could go on and on about this movie, from Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon's spirited performances as Grant's surrogate parents to the heartbreaking monologue Ayres has about why he loves to drink, but anything I might say would only keep you from rediscovering this lovely little treasure.