They made me care about the Joker. Give them their Oscars now!

I need to get this out of the way right from the jump. I couldn't care less about the Joker. Part of it comes from the fact that he was created to be the perfect antithesis of Batman, and I think Batman is the most overrated comic book hero of all time. Not that there haven't been depictions of Joker or Joker story arcs that I've enjoyed (hello, Killing Joke), but overall, I find him kind of lame.

Yet the new Joker movie made me care deeply about and relate strongly to this Joker. And I'm as shocked by that knowledge as you are.

Joker drops us into a decrepit, decaying world where garbagemen are striking and everyday life is full of violence and suffering. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) suffers a consistent stream of slings and arrows and his only escapes are delusions that result from his mental illness and his dreams of becoming a successful standup comic.

Arthur's life keeps getting worse. He loses his job. He discovers shattering secrets his mother (Frances Conroy) kept from him. The cops keep harassing him. The hits keep coming. Yet he discovers that embracing the darkness in his life may be the key that frees him from what holds him down and maybe even turn him into a folk hero in the process.

This is one of the meatiest comic book-based flicks we've seen in a while, with different layers of meaning riding atop a fractured narrative that may or may not all be playing out in Arthur's head. The film touches on themes like the disdain the rich hold for normal folks and how society abandons the mentally ill.  

Even the setting of the film offers angles that are relatable to what we're living through right now. It's a world where the rich are crushing working-class folks and goes apeshit when yuppie douchebags get murdered while not even acknowledging the suffering of poor people.  The film is set in the 80s but it might as well be set today. It's a mirror for modern American life and it's a dirty, dirty mirror indeed.

At the heart of Joker is Phoenix's amazing performance. He is horrifying, sympathetic and though he does reprehensible things, you can see his point of view and it even makes sense. This is not a version of Joker that we've seen before, but it's also a Joker who has far more depth and character development than any previous cinematic Joker. 

Phoenix gets fabulous support from Robert De Niro, who plays a smarmy late-night TV host and Conroy, who plays her character's disconnection from reality beautifully. Brett Cullen also scores, giving us a Thomas Wayne who treats normies the way rich assholes actually treat regular people.

Visually, director Todd Philips and his team use the color palette brilliantly to create a sense of dread and unease. A mix of turquoise and yellow create a queasy feeling right from the jump. Phillips knows when to use close-ups for maximum impact and he wisely avoids a lot of rapid-fire editing full of short shots and quick cutting.  He just tells the story, and for this story, that's exactly the right decision.

I had heard over and over how disturbing Joker is. I didn't find it to be disturbing exactly. Instead, I found the film to be the cinematic representation of something my buddy Erik used to say all the time: "Life is like a toilet bowl. It's always full of shit and you can't find the plunger." I also found Joker oddly hopeful. All in all, what scared me about Joker wasn't how disturbing the content of the film was. What scared me about Joker was how much sense it made to me.