Before there was Charlie Sheen, there was Joaquin Phoenix.
Joaquin Phoenix in I'm Still Here.
As Johnny Rotten sneered at the audience at the end of the final (until the inevitable reunions) Sex Pistols concert: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Actually, I don’t, because I rumbled Joaquin Phoenix’s shambolic February 2009 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman right from the moment it came out that Casey Affleck was making a film about him. Of course it was a hoax. How could it be anything else?
But even when Affleck’s film, I’m Still Here, was released last year, there were still those unsure whether it was a documentary or mockumentary – until Phoenix and Affleck fessed up and Phoenix emerged clean and sober, slim and shaven, from the shaggy-bearded, fat-bellied, last-days-of-Jim-Morrison body he’d been occupying for the previous 18 months.
It would be nice to think Letterman doesn’t feel cheated, either. That he at least amongst the media and other celebrities so ready to jeer at Phoenix was in on it all along. Because if he wasn’t, that interview, for which he received such praise, looks awfully shabby when you watch it in I’m Still Here – a cruel succession of one-liners (“What can you tell us about your days with the Unabomber?”; “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight”) at the expense of a clearly deeply damaged man. Or, as it turns out, a man acting clearly deeply damaged, and doing a brilliant job of it.
Perhaps this was the whole point of the exercise: to show up the exploitative celebrity-circuit treadmill and its readiness to eat its own in exchange for another tawdry few minutes of airtime or another column of newsprint. Perhaps. But I doubt it was more than a fortuitous outcome – fortuitous because it is one of the few things to give the film shape and purpose.
You have to admire the elaborate completeness of the hoax, and Phoenix and Affleck’s straight-faced execution of it, without so much as a wink to camera (although a clearly faked gross-out extended vomiting scene is just one of several moments that give the game away).
Phoenix plays the spoilt celebrity wreck to perfection, with his mumbling slur as he mouths ponderous inanities and wallows in self-pity, all the time descending into ever more squalid drug-addled decline while being indulged by his entourage (“If he wants to do something we do it”).
His premature retirement from acting in order to pursue a hip-hop career, styling himself JP (telling a concert audience: “This is not my night, this is our night – JP is all of us”) and being dicked around by P Diddy as he chases him to produce what will be the “hip-hop Bohemian Rhapsody”, is … amusing.
But, like the film as a whole, it is never more than that. And mostly not even that. Artfully directed though it is, the film is full of limp longueurs and feels as though it is being played more for the amusement of Phoenix and, dare one say it, his entourage (“If he wants to do something we do it”) than for the rest of us. It’s a Saturday Night Live sketch blown out of all proportions.
Moreover, the celebrity-circuit treadmill moves fast: in the light of Charlie Sheen, where the mask really has eaten into the face, I’m Still Here and Phoenix’s performance seem quaintly innocuous, not to say unambitious.
I’M STILL HERE (Reel/Roadshow), directed by Casey Affleck, available now.