But it also applies just as well to Joe, the traumatized veteran and assassin-for-hire he played in Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant, underseen 2018 crime thriller, “You Were Never Really Here.” Phoenix’s work in that movie is, I think, the deeper, richer performance of the two, the moodily restrained flip side to “Joker’s” furious histrionics. Apart from a sliver of tenderness in his relationship with his aging, ailing mother, he is a man incapable of giving or receiving human kindness, an outcast from society turned avenger of the downtrodden.Īll this is true of Arthur Fleck, the villainous psychopath at the center of Todd Phillips’ “Joker” and the role that won Phoenix the best actor Oscar on Sunday night. Having witnessed terrible things and endured horrific abuse, he now projects that abuse outward in brutal but meticulously orchestrated eruptions of violence. In one of his greatest, most entrancing performances, Joaquin Phoenix plays a coldblooded killer who strikes terror in the hearts of the rich, the predatory and the corrupt.
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