The film that ran so Joker could walk, or at least stumble around in its wake
Joaquin Phoenix's character is a reclusive, lonely individual. His only bond of emotional significance is with his mother, who he lives with and looks after in her old age. A haunted man with a troubled past and a bleak future, he continuously struggles with suicidal thoughts and his mind is fractured by past traumas. If this is sounding a little familiar, you might have seen Joker, the box office juggernaut that won Phoenix his first Oscar last year. Yet for all of that movie's success, it probably wouldn't have existed without Lynne Ramsay's 2017 film or Joaquin Phoenix's brilliant understated performance in it.
He plays Joe, a traumatised veteran who works as a hit-man, rescuing victims of child trafficking and brutally dispatching of their captors, his only weapon being a ball-peen hammer. He is hired by a senator to rescue his daughter, Nina, who has been kidnapped by a human trafficking network in a seemingly routine job (for him, at least) which spirals into a web of corruption and intrigue.
The film won two awards at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, despite not being finished when it premiered: Best Actor for Joaquin and Best Screenplay for director and writer Lynne Ramsay. Her fantastically minimalist screenplay doesn't actually contain much dialogue- there is little to no exposition, and much of the plot-driven elements happen in the background, almost as white noise to Joe. The focus is squarely on the psyche of the central character, with flashbacks to the oppressive discipline of his father and his disturbing experiences in the military and FBI returning again and again, breaking up the action, almost like glitches on a TV screen. We first meet him as he sits with his head cocooned in a plastic bag, trying to hide from his mind, his face twisted in a silent cry of pain and anguish.
Joe has something of a reputation for brutality and we see this several times through the drama. The violence, when it happens, is savage and fierce, though we rarely see it unfiltered: in one scene the camera watches through a broken pane of glass, while another sequence where he breaks into a brothel unfolds through fragmented pieces of security footage.
Alongside these gritty, violent passages are more lyrical, almost beautiful sequences, almost mirroring the unstable dual aspects in Joe's character. There's a beautiful underwater moment that almost recall the ghostly beauty of Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, as well as a scene where Joe sings Charlene's"I've Never Been to Me" with a dying adversary. We see him acting playfully and tenderly tending to his mother in one scene, in the next he slowly dangles a dagger above his mouth, almost flirting with the blissful release of death. Joe brutally kills of a series of bodyguards before tenderly picking up the prodigal Nina, played hauntingly by Ekaterina Samsonov.
The entire film is driven by Joaquin Phoenix's performance, whose tortured character says very little, conveying everything with small movements and expressions. Unlike his awards-winning turn in Joker, where every action was hammered with wild strokes on a large canvas and every emotion etched with wild and over-the-top extremities, here he is quiet and subtle, delivering, with a look, a performance which is volumes deeper and more impactful than his one as the Joker.
Lynne Ramsay's directing and the editing is all perfect, down to a notch- the film runs a tight 89 minutes and not a single scene is wasted, every performance as lean and sharp, unlike the bedraggled raggedness of its central character.
Johnny Greenwood's pounding, dissonantly beautiful score runs underneath everything, heightening and underscoring every moment, and Thomas Townend's cinematography, with its grizzly close-ups help add to the overwhelming sense of achievement.
Lynne Ramsay's film is a vision of a hit-man which is much more interested in the man than the hit, and Joaquin Phoenix is quietly brilliant in portraying the fractured psyche of a tormented mind.