PICK OF THE WEEK
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX
General release
Awaiting trial for the murders he committed in Joker (2019), Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is granted permission to attend a singing class at Arkham State Hospital – a privilege arranged by Officer Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) as a reward for good behaviour. The therapist running the group says that “music heals the fractures within us” – a familiar contention that Todd Phillips’s audacious, compelling sequel tests to the limit.
The movie starts as it means to go on with a Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon sequence, entitled Me & My Shadow, in which Arthur and his dark alter ego tussle to the strains of Tom Jones’ What The World Needs Now Is Love. In real life – or the closest that we get to it – his well-meaning lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) believes that he does indeed suffer from a split personality disorder caused by childhood abuse, and that his crimes were the work of “Joker”, a psychopathic secondary persona, rather than Arthur himself.
Reduced to a shuffling skeleton, he is nonetheless drawn to fellow inmate Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) – Harley Quinn in the Batman universe – with whom he starts to sing, the music forging a bond between them and, it seems, opening Arthur’s long-dormant heart.
At the prison’s movie night, they sit side by side like awkward teenagers watching Jack Buchanan belt out That’s Entertainment! in The Band Wagon (1953). Lee tells Arthur that she is a superfan of his murderous escapades and is obsessed by a TV movie made about him.
In a series of increasingly dramatic fantasy sequences, together and individually, they perform a string of classics: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, from Pal Joey (1940); Sinatra’s That’s Life; the Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody; Bricusse and Newley’s The Joker; and Sammy Davis Jr’s Gonna Build a Mountain.
All of which might sound merely eccentric, or even sentimental. But – this being a Todd Phillips Joker movie – there is brutal subversion at work. Just as the first film interrogated comedy and clowning, and asked whether laughter can be a delivery system for cruelty, humiliation and dehumanisation, Folie à Deux takes music – surely, as the therapist said, a healing force? – and makes it a medium for deception, pain and lethal misunderstanding.
At the trial, the judge warns Arthur, now in full Joker costume, that he is not in a comedy club. Like a comic sitting on a barstool, he pivots to look deep into the television camera, as if to say: you sure about that, your honour? Inside and outside the courtroom, his manic supporters cheer him on. In this fallen world, everything is spectacle, everything is showbusiness. That’s entertainment.
BOOK
OUR EVENINGS
Alan Hollinghurst
In a generally dreary era for contemporary fiction, there are few authors who can still create a buzz of anticipation when they announce a forthcoming novel, and Alan Hollinghurst is one of them. Since The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) took the literary world by storm, he has never disappointed; his exquisite prose, comedy of manners and character portrayal always a joy to read.
Hollinghurst’s seventh novel is his most elegiac, and exemplifies Kierkegaard’s maxim that life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. Dave Win, an Anglo-Burmese actor, chronicles his experience from “the far-off middle of the previous century” to the cusp of the pandemic. Aged 13, he is a scholarship boy at Bampton School, beneficiary of the Hadlow family’s largesse and visitor to their country house, Woolpeck.
Though Mark and Cara Hadlow are benign in intent, their son Giles is the novel’s malevolent Widmerpool; cruel, bigoted and destined to become a Tory MP and fierce Brexiteer. Dave, meanwhile, heads for Oxford, where his apparently certain success is horribly derailed. We follow him as he finds his feet as a young actor, tours with an avant-garde company (“a multicoloured rabble of men and women with a cheerful and possibly threatening appearance”), falls in and out of love and finally marries Richard Roughsedge, an academic. Always there for him is his mother, Avril, a dressmaker, who finds happiness with one of her clients, Esme Croft.
As ever in Hollinghurst’s fiction, the violent spite of homophobia is always lurking in the shadows; accompanied, in this case, by racism. But Dave’s story is not a convenient frame over which to drape a polemic: Hollinghurst is far too sophisticated an author for that, a masterly surveyor of the human oscillation between bliss and despair, and the abrasions of time upon the soul. Aged 70, he is an artist at the height of his powers. I can’t wait for the next one.
THEATRE
JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK
Gielgud Theatre, until November 23
This really has been the year of Succession on stage: in the past 12 months, I have seen Brian Cox (Logan Roy) play Bach in The Score; Sarah Snook (Shiv) in The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Jeremy Strong (Kendall) as Dr Thomas Stockmann in An Enemy of the People.
So now: three cheers for J Smith-Cameron (who played Gerri, a senior executive at Waystar Royco), who is terrific as Juno Boyle in Matthew Warchus’s production of Juno and the Paycock. She and Mark Rylance – also magnificent as “Captain” Jack Boyle – do full justice to the wit and verbal brilliance of Seán O’Casey’s classic drama, set in the tenements of Dublin in 1922 as the Irish civil war begins.
Rylance, full of bluster and tall tales, lets the physical comedy rip, without ever losing sight of his character’s deep and unresolved melancholy. Smith-Cameron communicates through her sheer presence Juno’s strength at the heart of a dysfunctional family, and the price that this role exacts.
Can she keep chaos – what Jack calls “chassis” – at bay? “The whole world’s in a terrible state of chassis!” he declares – at which point, this great historical drama seems all too contemporary.
CINEMA
FOUR KINGS
On streaming platforms
In the space of nine days in 1993, four extraordinary Black British boxers, children of the Windrush generation, fought in two world championship bouts that were watched by half a billion people.
On October 1 of that year, Lennox Lewis successfully defended his WBC heavyweight belt against Frank Bruno. Eight days later, Chris Eubank, WBO super middleweight champion, and Nigel Benn, his WBC counterpart, battled one another to a controversial draw. This excellent four-part series, spanning decades of rivalry, pivots around these two legendary bouts.
Frank Bruno was the most beloved of the four, but he suffered greatly from Lewis’s taunt that, because of his pantomime appearances and TV ads, he had allowed himself to be an “Uncle Tom”. Lewis, having grown up in Canada, had to fight hard to win acceptance as a Brit.
Eubank, meanwhile, was pilloried as haughty, arrogant and cold-hearted; while Benn, the “Dark Destroyer”, struggled with childhood trauma and sought escape in self-destructive partying.
Of the four, only Lewis appears to have escaped mental health problems (“If I am a world champion then how can I not be crazy?” says Eubank), and Bruno, now aged 62, is experiencing cognitive decline. Benn and Eubank have settled their differences and toured on stage to talk about their fights and feuding. In the documentary, Bruno visits Lewis in Jamaica, where the latter seeks forgiveness for the “Uncle Tom” slur (but does not quite apologise).
The series does not draw an explicit conclusion about the legitimacy of the sport. But it leaves the viewer in no doubt that the heroism, drama and magnificence of combat in the ring come at a terrible price.
