The nervous musical: Joker: Folie À Deux enters a genre with two left feet

There will be plenty of reasons thrown around for the box office failure of the big-budget supervillain sequel Joker: Folie À Deux, and it’s easy to imagine one will be the genre where the movie dabbles quite heavily at times: the movie musical. Trailers for Joker 2 didn’t exactly hide the fact that it featured musical sequences. They trumpeted the inclusion of pop singer Lady Gaga, they showed her character Lee both singing and dancing with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, the sets glimpsed included a variety show and what looked like a smoky piano bar—whaddya need, a road map? But they also appeared to hedge, as many trailers for modern musicals do, how much of this material to show, perhaps wary of whether fans of the first movie would be excited for that particular genre pivot. As it turns out, this hedging is built textually into Joker: Folie À Deux, because it belongs to a sometimes nebulous but clearly extant subgenre: It is a nervous musical. 

Most nervous musicals could be simply described as musicals, possibly with the prefix “semi-” attached; they’re movies that take the overall shape of song-and-or-dance pictures but consciously resist the full exuberance of the genre out of some impulse, whether artistic desire to subvert or genuine nervousness about giving themselves over. It would be easy to confuse them with non-integrated musicals, not least because that’s an actual term and “nervous musical” is something I just made up. Non-integrated musicals, where the musical numbers have some kind of rational placement in the narrative (typically because the characters are singers, dancers, musicians, etc.), can have a similar one-foot-in, one-foot-out effect, and form the basis of the nervous musical.

There are also many older movies that include a song or three without quite committing to the musical form. For the sake of an easier definition, let’s say that the modern (American) nervous musical has its genesis in the mavericks and movie brats of the ’70s, who changed American cinema forever but were too in love with its past to abandon the old ways completely. Accordingly, many of them seemed to yearn for some form of musical, whether Brian De Palma’s spoofy rock saga Phantom Of The Paradise, Robert Altman’s non-integrated Nashville (which has more pure music performance in it than many concert movies), Martin Scorsese’s off-putting New York, New York, Francis Ford Coppola’s boondoggle One From The Heart, or even Steven Spielberg’s 1941, whose slapstick has some lavish musical qualities even as it goofs on another type of movie entirely.

The Scorsese and Coppola films in particular form the backbone of the contemporary nervous musical. Scorsese’s New York, New York could easily read as a non-integrated musical, as a show business story following the tumultuous relationship between a singer (Liza Minnelli) and a sax player (Robert De Niro). But Scorsese’s style turns it into something else: He sought to merge a realistic, documentary-like approach to the acting and dialogue with songs, situations, and sets that would throw back to more old-fashioned musicals from decades earlier. (He even lucked into the all-time classic title song in the bargain, the kind of cred that you can’t always bank on.) The resulting film is cacophonous, if often fascinating—a musical that stubbornly resists itself. One From The Heart goes even further, with stunning cinematography, gorgeously appointed soundstage sets, elaborate dance numbers, and characters who can’t quite sing; instead, a soundtrack from Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits expresses their feelings. It’s well worth seeing, but emotionally, it doesn’t connect, and while it’s more purely pleasurable than Scorsese’s version, it’s harder to understand why, exactly, Coppola felt the need to push back against his own musical elements.

Joker: Folie À Deux has elements of both of these films and, whatever else you can say about this misbegotten production, it’s certainly a more interesting bit of movie-brat recycling than the first movie’s skimming off the top of The King Of Comedy and Taxi Driver. Though the sets are more minimal than One From The Heart’s, the cinematography is similarly rich and textured, especially compared to most other superhero movies of recent vintage. The Joker/Harley relationship dysfunction, meanwhile, reflects both New York and Heart, where Scorsese and Coppola drew a contrast between the beauty of older musicals (and the oft-playful or deeply romantic couplings contained therein) and something rawer and less camera-ready. 

But Folie À Deux borrows its central conceit from a more traditional musical that nonetheless belongs on the nervous-musical spectrum: Rob Marshall’s 2002 adaptation of Chicago. That movie envisioned its musical numbers as fantasies in the minds of its criminal characters, for reasons both thematic (crime as show business) and practical (a sop to the “Why are they singing and dancing out of nowhere?” crowd, despite no perceived resistance to the similar implausibility of, say, regularly timed action sequences or comic set pieces). The Joker sequel does the same thing: The songs warbled by Arthur and Lee occasionally start as real-world, a capella singing or light dancing, but they frequently spin out into Arthur’s elaborate, musicalized fantasies. It’s a smart way of depicting that fantasy-reality tension that nervous musicals often thrive on—though in nicking from Chicago, the movie may have absorbed some misguided lessons from that influential film.

Chicago was received, in conjunction with the previous year’s Moulin Rouge!, as a return to the big-studio movie musical after decades of lying relatively dormant, and broadly speaking, that’s true; the critical, box office, and awards success of these movies, Chicago in particular, helped make musicals a regular multiplex fixture again. But Chicago’s rationalization of song and dance also plays like a co-opting of the nervous musical form as a way not to create tension or discord, but to ease the audience’s mind that there’s a reason—an excuse!—to enjoy the unreality of a musical framework. In the barren years leading up to Chicago, filmmakers did more interesting, less apologetic work in the nervous musical subgenre that managed to actually toy with expectations as Scorsese and Coppola did—arguably more successfully, even.

Everyone Says I Love You, from Woody Allen (sorry), was a traditional musical comedy (and a traditionally Allen-style entertainment of the era) in most ways but one: Almost everyone in the large ensemble cast sang their own songs, whether they had much singing acumen or not, introducing a nervous wobble into the otherwise-polished film. (Though some of the cast acquit themselves quite nicely, on first viewing you’re never certain what you’re going to get from any given song.) 

Even more striking is Lars von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark, wherein the pop singer Björk plays a woman who escapes from the video-shot misery of her impoverished existence into lush musical fantasies, which are at once transcendent of her experiences (bigger camera set-ups than the handheld shots that define her “real” life; tons of extras; bolder colors) and still colored by the limitations just out of frame (they’re still all shot on 2000-era digital video). Complicating matters further, Dancer In The Dark traffics in heavy melodrama even in its real-life sections, creating an audacious heightening of emotions across its varying techniques.

By comparison, the idea of Chicago’s musical numbers happening in Roxie Hart’s head feels a little facile and simplistic, as Marshall combines minimalist, stagy set-ups with frantic music-video cutting. That’s the dilemma of the nervous musical: How to express this ambivalence toward or tension within the genre without seeming like an extended apology for it?

The musical numbers are easily the best part of Joker: Folie À Deux, and the way that they hold back Lady Gaga’s potentially powerhouse vocals, having them instead meet the level of Phoenix’s quieter, less assured singing, bottles and pressurizes the movie’s tension better than almost anything that happens in its real world. Yet director Todd Phillips does also seem a little embarrassed by the form, ultimately treating it more as Arthur’s stupid delusion than something the audience would actually enjoy seeing and living in. There are countless ways to push the musical aspects of Folie À Deux further while staying within the realm of a nervous musical that can’t quite fully give itself over to that sense of joy; Phillips opts for none of the above, and winds up varying the different musical numbers in location and duration, but not tempo, emotion, or effect. Phillips doesn’t have enough faith in the musical segments to assign them anything more complex than Arthur and Lee’s shared-until-it’s-not delusion.

It’s not just fear of the comic-book milieu, either. There’s a similar sense of stepping back from boldness at the heart of the upcoming Emilia Pérez, a musical about a drug kingpin who makes the medical transition into womanhood—in other words, a movie that very much trades on its conceptual wildness. As with Joker, the movie’s musical sequences—a gloriously ridiculous hospital-research number with twirling orderlies; a karaoke-bar sequence with a besotted Selena Gomez; Zoe Saldaña venting her frustrations at a black tie dinner whose attendants are frozen around her—are its best moments, threatening to send the story’s emotions spinning out in bold new directions. And as with Joker, these moments only diminish the rest of the movie, making it look like clunky melodrama that lacks the bravery to sing it out. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of those trailers, like the one for Folie À Deux, that don’t seem quite sure how to break it to an audience that they’re being sold a musical.

The Coppola and Scorsese versions of the musical may not be traditionally successful or satisfying, but their frustrations never feel timid. They strike an uneasy truce between the promise of artifice and the limitations of reality. The difficulty in making a nervous musical now that traditional ones are less rare is the number of the latter that co-opt that nervousness, that buzzy uncertainty, to facilitate a larger-scale chickening out. There’s nervousness, and there’s cowardice; the most important thing about making a less traditional musical is understanding the difference.