“I’m the bad guy?” That’s the question Michael Douglas’s character, William Foster, asks in the final minutes of the movie Falling Down. Despite the fact that the movie, up until that point, solidly aligns itself with Foster’s point of view and his sick sense of vigilante justice, this one line of dialog suggests that Falling Down is a more self-aware movie than director Todd Phillips’s Joker. There’s never any question that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, who transforms himself over the course of this origin story into Batman’s greatest nemesis, is our champion.
And the movie seems to have no idea how disturbing that is.
The bleak, nihilistic Joker, which, by its final frames, leans into its fascism in a way that even the heavily reactionary Falling Down doesn’t, says a lot more about Phillips’s worldview than the character he is exploring.