“I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the centre of the universe.”
This have been just one of many inspiring and very true words of Joaquin Phoenix latest speech at the Oscar Award Ceremony as he accepts the best actor Academy Award for his role as the damaged clown Arthur Fleck in Joker.
Description
Forever alone in a crowd, failed comedian Arthur Fleck seeks connection as he walks the streets of Gotham City. He transforms himself into a tortured and mentally unstable loner driven to highly inhumane acts of violence—against humans—in pursuit of a quixotic stand-up comedy career. On camera his cackling laughter, sheepish grin, and slow-blinking eyes channel unexpected heartbreak and humanity in a DC Comics villain from Batman—in fact, erasing any trace of comic books and instead presenting a character study of a fevered vigilante suffering from mental illness, alienation, narcissism, and latent rage. Directed by Todd Phillips as an homage to grimy 1970s and ’80s classics, especially those made by Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro (who costars), the film’s artful depiction of an alienated white man performing acts of nihilistic savagery has already rekindled the conversation over the relationship between Hollywood violence and the real-life kind seen last summer in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Phoenix mostly wants to let the film speak for itself. “There’s so many different ways of looking at it,” Phoenix says of the Arthur Fleck/Joker character. “You can either say here’s somebody who, like everybody, needed to be heard and understood and to have a voice. Or you can say this is somebody that disproportionately needs a large quantity of people to be fixated on him. His satisfaction comes as he stands in amongst the madness.”
Phoenix has always had an intuitive feel for the dark side of the human psyche. In Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, from 2017, he played a damaged hit man who kills rich men who rape underage girls by hitting them with a ball-peen hammer. Before that, in Spike Jonze’s Her—during which he met his fiancée, costar Rooney Mara—he was a lonely depressive who finds love in his computer’s operating system. In 2010, he flummoxed everyone by playing a semifictional version of himself as a self-destructive actor trying to build a hip-hop career for the mockumentary I’m Still Here—a movie that further complicated the line between reality and fiction when director Casey Affleck was sued for untoward behavior by two female crew members—before returning with a bravura performance in The Master, as the unhinged devotee of an L. Ron Hubbard-like quasi-religious leader. That began a run of finely wrought indie performances.
Observing the darkness in his work, it’s tempting to look for its source in his personal history. It wasn’t long ago that he was still being referred to as “the second most famous Phoenix,” his name associated most closely with the death of his cult-legend brother, River, in 1993, which Joaquin witnessed, along with sister Rain, in front of the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, then co-owned by Johnny Depp. The public memory of his brother has faded enough that Joaquin is now the most familiar Phoenix, but the tragedy is never far for Joaquin himself. In part that’s because reporters never stop asking him about it. But he was also deeply influenced by his brother, and by his death, even if he remains reluctant to draw a straight line between his unusual background and his private tragedy and his talent for inhabiting the morose, damaged, violent, and otherwise anxiety-riddled characters he takes on—roles he seems vividly made for.
Phoenix has recently undergone hypnosis to quit smoking, a habit he took up as a teenager, but it doesn’t seem to be working out. His fingernails are chewed to nubs and he keeps two packs of American Spirits and several lighters close at hand. “I eat really healthy,” he says. “I don’t really like junk food. I don’t like processed foods. Right? But I still can—like, I’ll fuck up a bag of chips. Like a fuckin’ Subway sandwich and shit.” For Joker, he went on an extremely restrictive diet—advised by the same doctor who helped him lose weight for The Master—and lost 52 pounds. After the film, he gained back 25, but the oily image of his severe, wraithlike body in the trailer for Jokerarrived like a shock last spring, evidence that Phoenix had once again gone all in on a role.
As Arthur Fleck, Phoenix leans into his physical features, from the scar on his upper lip (not a surgically fixed cleft, he says, but a nonsurgical scar he was born with) to his leonine gaze, sad-sack grin, and distended shoulder, which he was also born with. Phillips told him he looked like “one of those birds from the Gulf of Mexico that they’re rinsing the tar off.” “He’s got the most interesting form,” he says. “He’s so beautiful.”
To develop the character of Arthur Fleck, Phoenix did research on narcissism and criminology and studied the movements of Buster Keaton and actor Ray Bolger, the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz,which inspired the highly creepy dance that so acutely expresses Fleck’s private madness. During one scene, the screenplay called for Fleck to shut himself in a bathroom after several murders, looking for a place to hide his gun. Phoenix and Phillips decided it didn’t feel right, and while they discussed the scene, Phillips played Phoenix some newly composed music for the movie. Phoenix began dancing, an elegant, tango-like movement, and Phillips asked the cameraman to start filming with a handheld camera, just the three of them in the room while a crew of 250 waited outside. The scene became part of an eye-popping trailer, set to a Jimmy Durante tune, “Smile.”
