It’s never quite clear why Arthur’s so emaciated, but the way he contorts his spindly frame, and occasionally stretches it out into a joyful, Kabuki-esque dance, is mesmerizing. Who better than crazy-eyed Joaquin Phoenix? The actor’s physicality here is something to behold.
#IN THE DEEP MOVIE 2016 REVIEW CRACK#
We all have our favorites - Heath Ledger’s mine, though I’ll never forget my first, Cesar Romero - but there’s no reason someone else can’t take a crack at it. It’s a different take on the DC comics character, and why not? The Joker’s an anarchic villain for the ages, still wide open for interpretation even after countless portrayals. If the casting of Robert De Niro as a late-night talk show host wasn’t enough to tip you off, the mood and look of “Joker” is deeply rooted in (not to say derivative of) the gritty New York dramas of the ’70s and ’80s, particularly “Taxi Driver,” “Death Wish” and “The King of Comedy” - the latter of which starred De Niro as a creepy stalker obsessed with a popular entertainer. This oddball, vulnerable soul gets beaten up - literally by goons, figuratively by the healthcare system - and then beaten up again. It’s a seriously dark urban drama about a charmless schlub (Phoenix) saddled with a brain injury that gives him an inadvertent cackle, caring for his ailing mom (Frances Conroy) and working a lousy gig as a rent-a-clown while nursing dreams of being a stand-up comic. Let’s be clear, this is no comic-book romp. The rest of “Joker” is, in essence, a compelling character study - one whose appeal may be limited to Batman completists, of whom there are certainly quite a few. (Just ask John Rambo, back at the box office a couple weeks ago.) It’s horrifying, it’s artful - and it’s hardly alone in its cinematic zest for violence. Its final act is, indeed, bracingly over the top, as Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck sheds his sad-sack chrysalis and emerges into full-blown Joker mode. In this, Todd Phillips’ origin story seems to have succeeded, given the amount of lip service paid to worries that “Joker” will weaponize volatile viewers. The aim of the Joker has always been to sow chaos and panic in the citizens of Gotham City. Cracknell’s production shows Rattigan as an inheritor of Ibsen’s mantle, a visionary about the circumstances that imprison people.Running time: 122 minutes. Suicide was illegal, as was homosexuality: the play expresses some of Rattigan’s own experience. In 1952, an unmarried woman living with her lover was “living in sin”. She turns the closing moments into an episode of surprising gusto after grief. Though heavy hearted, she moves like a feather. She has the abandon of the unhappy lover. She has the poise of the establishment wife: irony and steel in place just when you expect her to break.
The exchanges between Hubert Burton and Yolanda Kettle as the young and conventional neighbours are starchy without seeming in period. Tom Burke, as the lover, transmits a sense of damage but little of danger. McCrory is in a different league from everyone else on stage. McCrory is in a different league from everyone else on stage Above and around her room, people are dimly seen, like ghosts, behind screens. Lofty, echoing and painted a dull aquamarine, Tom Scutt’s design makes the lodging house in (then unfashionable) Ladbroke Grove look as if it has been sunk underwater.
It is also strong on the reasons for this numbness. If he doesn’t love you as you love him, what do you get from him? Hester is asked. The cause of her suicidal grief is her emotionally numbed lover, Freddie, for whom she has left her prosperous, affectionate husband. Yet she makes of Hester Collyer a remarkable and unexpected heroine.Ĭollyer is the woman stretched out in front of an unlit gas fire at the beginning of the play, who by the end may be peeping out towards a new life. All the things a 21st-century woman does not want to be. In an indelible performance, Helen McCrory is buffeted, wretched, plaintive, strung-along, strung-up, manipulative. The painful realism of the play is encased in strangeness. That is not quite what she does in The Deep Blue Sea. A fter the whirling excitement of her production of A Doll’s House, I half-expected Carrie Cracknell to let rip at Terence Rattigan.