Folie à Deux: The Musical of Lee Quinn and the Joker/Phoenix Co-Oscillator

The big non-news about “Folie à Deux” is that it’s a half-baked, halfhearted musical complete with one star who can sing, Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel a.k.a. Harley Quinn, and another (Phoenix) who can’t or won’t. Gaga and Phoenix perform assorted song-and-sometimes-dance numbers featuring classics from the Great American Songbook that are mixed in with some traditional tunes and recent songs. The movie holds you and it is fun to see Phoenix get his Gene Kelly on with tap-tap-tapping. The numbers are distributed throughout the movie, which otherwise largely toggles between scenes of Joker — and his sad-sack civilian alter-ego, Arthur Fleck — locked in a mental institution and of him in a Gotham court, standing trial on multiple counts of murder.

After years of DC trying to evolve the Harley Quinn brand beyond her roots as the Joker’s girlfriend, Folie à Deux takes her back to most of the basics. Here, she’s just another inmate at Arkham rather than a psychiatrist working for the city, but she still brings color and — more importantly — music into Arthur’s life. On its face, casting Lady Gaga to sing Hollywood standards as one of the most iconic and subversive characters DC has ever churched out was a brilliant decision. While Lee is largely seen as part of the story, it feels like she isn’t given much of a choice in what to do with her.

If Folie à Deux’s musical numbers were really enjoyable, that might not be so much of an issue, but for the most part, they’re so lacking in whimsy or any sense of fun that it’s hard to ever get swept up in them. They’re also over almost as soon as they’ve begun. Then, the movie drops you right back into Arthur’s bleak reality from which there never seem to be any viable routes of escape.