How Joker's best scene renders the rest of the movie pointless [SPOILERS]

Hi! I didn't like Joker very much. And while I was initially content not to extend my takes beyond this brief tweet lest I contribute to The Discourse, I must confess that the movie has remained in my mind for the last couple of days. Not for the reasons I'm sure director Todd Phillips wants it to be, granted, but rather because it's such a fascinating failure, a quote-unquote "real movie snuck into the studio system under the guise of a comic book film" that ends up feeling considerably more shallow and less sure of itself than at least the recent upper tier of the genre it tries so hard to stand above. Maybe it's just because the only film to attempt something similar is Logan, and that one was, y'know, good?

But as much as I'd love to rail on Phillips for being a smug, insufferable toolbox on top of being a mediocre director, let's just focus on the "mediocre director" part. See, I do happen to think that there's one genuinely magnificent scene in Joker, and while it's a perfect microcosm of what Phillips is trying to do, the success of this scene only underlines how the film as a whole fails to justify its existence. This involves getting into specifics, but you're all adults and you saw the spoiler warning in the header, so let's get into this.

Arthur has just been (rightly) fired from his job at a rent-a-clown agency for bringing a loaded gun into a children's hospital. He's taking the subway home late at night, still in his outfit and makeup, when a couple of Wall Street douchebags on the train start pulling the "give us a smile" routine on a woman who clearly wants to be left alone. Suddenly, Arthur begins launching into one of his uncontrollable laughing frenzies, and the men turn their attention to him, because they think he's laughing at them, and if there's one thing that rich, white, smug, insecure bullies hate, it's being laughed at.

So they attack him. And eventually Arthur decides to use that gun that just lost him his job. The scene isn't shocking because of the violence; I've seen guys get shot in movies before. It's for how suddenly the tables turn. One moment, this asshole is stomping on a helpless Arthur. Only a couple of frames later, his brains are all over the window.

In that moment, we think we're seeing the beginning of a familiar character arc: Our lead is introduced to violence through necessity, but as they grows more comfortable with it, their acts become increasingly less justified. The obvious comparison is Taxi Driver, while the "I can't believe you actually remember The Brave One" comparison is the 2007 Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One. Arthur Fleck is on a sled, and he's just been given his first push, and he's only going to pick up speed as the slope steepens.

But then the scene takes an unexpected turn. Two of Arthur's assailants are dead, while the third is whimpering and stumbling away with a bullet in his leg. Arthur has emerged victorious. But instead of letting it go, he chases the final attacker off the train and executes him in cold blood on the subway platform with a distinct look of satisfaction on his face. And there it is. There's no slow boil, no gradual escalation. Arthur gets his first taste of the upper hand and he loves it.

If Phillips wanted to make a standalone examination of the Joker's psyche, this five-minute stretch of the film would have made a terrific short, because the character completes his entire arc within this single scene. At the start, he's at the lowest moment of his life, a figurative and literal clown who's been punched constantly and never punched back. By the end, he emerges a murderous vigilante. As a different interpretation of this character once said, all it takes is a little push.

The problem is that this scene occurs before the film's halfway point, and now that Phillips has told us everything we need to know about his Joker, there's nowhere else for him to go. From that moment forward, Joker becomes predictable. Once we know that Arthur has no remorse about killing, everyone who wrongs him is marked for death. When Arthur pockets a pair of scissors before meeting with the coworker who ratted him out, there's zero question that the scissors are gonna end up in that guy's skull. When Arthur fantasizes about shooting himself on the talk show, we know for certain that he will instead turn the gun on the host who invited him on just to mock him.

Even if Joker's story beats all play out exactly as I'd anticipated, I could still give the movie a passing grade if it had a point, but Phillips is too cowardly a filmmaker to take a stand on anything. He makes his main character an unambiguous villain, but ensures that said villain's only victims are people who "deserve" it. He notes the unfair stigma of the mentally ill, but paints them exclusively as murderers and domestic abusers. He portrays a society cheated by the 1%, but depicts the remaining 99% as a bloodthirsty mob spurred on by one random homicide. He brings up countless political issues but then just has the Joker proclaim that he "doesn't believe in anything."

Maybe Joker's muddy politics are the point. After all, some of the best portrayals of this character have dismissed the idea of his lust for chaos being some sort of quantifiable force. He's evil incarnate, and the fact that there's often so little motivation for his behavior is what makes him so scary (and such a fitting nemesis to Batman). But if the only explanation is that there is no explanation, why make a two-hour movie? What is the point of any of this?

I think it's pretty simple, honestly - a hack director, previously most famous for having Ken Jeong leap out of a trunk naked, got the idea that he'd become "respectable" if he'd just surround himself with a talented cast and crew and mix-and-match the plot threads from a couple of Scorsese movies. And given that it won the grand prize at the Venice International Film Festival - an honor previously awarded to Roma and The Shape of Water - his approach clearly seems to have worked for some people. But I walked away feeling like I'd just seen a very pretty, very well-acted waste of time.

Maybe a film that causes this much ruckus for this little reason is as fitting a tribute to the Joker as there could be. But that doesn't make it good.