The People's Joker - 2022
Directed by Vera Drew
Written Bri LeRose & Vera Drew
Starring Vera Drew, Lynn Downey, Kane Distler, Nathan Faustyn, David Liebe Hart & Christian Calloway
However Vera Drew's autobiographical story morphed into a cinematic venture, it's refreshing that her transgender journey can both evoke empathy but also be so much fun - it's enough to make me wish everyone could translate their life story into a Batman/DC Universe parody. The end result is me feeling like I know everything about her, and at the same time absolutely
nothing about her - or at least, I know her emotional journey without being able to summon up the most basic biographical details about her. Or, perhaps closer to what Vera Drew was intending here, I can appreciate the emotional journey trans people on the whole go through. What better way to tackle issues of identity than to base our central story in Gotham City, where heroes and villains project who they are with dazzling imagination and have often made some kind of transformation that forms an important part of their backstory. I might venture to mention that all of this lands a long way from personal experience for me - but all the more reason to be interested and have a desire to learn.
Our protagonist as a boy (played by Griffin Kramer) at the start of this story has a name that is bleeped out - it's a "deadname", and as such kept private. He starts to realise he has a different gender identity when he's taken to see
Batman Forever (or at least, this universe's version of that movie) by his mother (played by Lynn Downey). They live in Smallville, Kansas, and when the boy's mother hears him say he think's he's a girl in a boy's body she immediately drags him off to Arkham Asylum, where Dr. Crane (Christian Calloway) prescribes Smylex - a drug that gives it's users the appearance of being happy even if they're suffering from anxiety, depression or gender dysphoria. The underlying cause goes unappreciated and is dismissed. After coming of age, our protagonist moves to Gotham City and, after being rebuffed by a corrupt and tightly controlled
UCB Live television programme decides to start a new "anti-comedy" club (comedy being outlawed in Gotham), becoming Joker the Harlequin, whereupon he falls in love with fellow member Mr. J (Kane Distler), someone who has his own history with Batman (Phil Braun) - a caped law enforcer, with whom he had an abusive relationship. Eventually, under the tutelage of Ra's al Ghul (David Liebe Hart) our protagonist, now The People's Joker, takes on the system.
It's not easy describing how this movie works. There's a melding of the real world and a bizarre fascist version of the Gotham city we know from DC's Batman and it's various incarnations. It's presented with a mix of live action, animation and CGI computer graphics - which further disorients those of us who are still trying to grapple with the strange world this takes place in. Vera Drew takes full advantage of the freedom this allows her to tell her own personal stories while at the same time making full use of the various interpretations we've seen of Batman and Gotham in popular culture, from it's comic book inception to
Suicide Squad and Todd Phillip's
Joker. In fact, it was an attempted re-edit of
Joker undertaken by Vera Drew which led to this project. She started to visualize how the characters in the film reflected her own life - and I think that's something that can come from the deconstruction and reinterpretation of many films once we get down to the bare essentials. What came of it was a virtually unfilmable screenplay - one that really required the imagination with which this has been put together.
I have to say I really enjoyed the inverse relationship we have with what are usually the villains of Gotham City - here they're not "heroes" per say, but instead just prospective comedians who mostly retain the origin stories we're familiar with. Nathan Faustyn, as The Penguin, is a particular delight and surprise - probably because the performance, costume, make-up and general presentation is just a little low-rent and relaxed. It felt like the kind of Penguin impression you'd get from a funny friend, but in the end that was endearing enough for me. The Penguin turns out to be Joker the Harlequin's friend and confidante when he first moves to Gotham, and he fills out the role well. In the meantime Mr. J is embodied by the version of Joker we got from the first
Suicide Squad film, played by Jared Leto. It's fine to have various different Jokers in this movie - and in fact it's fine to have whatever else it wants to have - there are few rules, and anything goes. The controlling producer of UCB is Lorne Michaels (Maria Bamford) - Michaels is actually the producer of
Saturday Night Live in real life, and in the film he's a computer-generated character. It's dizzying.
I must admit that I rarely venture into territory this low-budgeted and strange, and that as a result the movie was a little daunting for me at first. At times I did find myself thinking, "This looks terrible," - there's a lot that looks aesthetically unpleasing, for whatever reason. The thing is, I can't be sure how much of that is on purpose - or even if all of that is on purpose, because it seems like it might be. There's a lot of brashness here. It takes me back to my peek at the animation of Jack Wedge, and the fact that I have to allow for artistic expression no matter how it conflicts with my particular palate. There's a narrative form that's a little different and that I had to familiarize myself with in order to get used to it, and that flows on into the visual form the film takes as well. But it's far from unintelligible, and it's far from being unpleasing on the whole. Joker the Harlequin's personal story is an essentially earthbound one, and only uses DC Universe characters and places to obfuscate and illustrate. It's intensely personal, full of humour, self-reflective and just a little sad and bittersweet at times. I want different experiences when I watch new movies, and if I learn something I'm pretty happy to have been nudged in
The People's Joker's direction.
Reply to Topic
...Please do bother to watch it, because of the rules and all
*We have to watch all the noms of course*
I tried my best.