What Was Joaquin Phoenix Trying to Do?

I was going to blog on the premiere of "Undercovers," which is a fun piece of romantic fluff, but then I stayed up to see Joaquin Phoenix's much-promoted return to David Letterman's show, and I feel compelled to add my two cents.

First, it was a relief to see Phoenix drop the act last night - gone were the beard, the sunglasses, and the mumbling. I'd read a few reviews of the new film at the center of the latest media scrum, "I'm Still Here," that questioned whether the whole rapper persona he'd adopted last year was an act or whether Phoenix had really gone off the deep end. Just about everyone wanted it to be an act, me included, though the saga of the actor apparently self-destructing over the course of the last two years was entertaining in a rubber-necking sort of way. And a grand total of nobody was surprised when co-conspirator Casey Affleck finally spilled the beans.

Letterman claimed that he knew Phoenix's new persona was false and played along during the actor's first appearance on "The Late Show." I'd have been inclined to agree eighteen months ago, but I started having doubts when "I'm Still Here" started prepping for its theatrical release and Phoenix still hadn't come clean about duping his audience. It takes serious dedication to go to those kinds of extremes for any kind of performance, so I have to respect him for putting aside two years of his life and risking his career to take on the challenge. However, I'm still not sure what he was trying to accomplish with the whole charade.


According to last night's interview, Phoenix and Affleck wanted to explore the nature of celebrity and its relationship with the media and the audience. They figured the best way to do this would be to turn Phoenix into a Lindsay Lohan-type walking disaster by staging an elaborate fake disintegration of his career. I can see how the concept has merit, and there are clear precedents for similar stunts from comedians like Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron Cohen. Heck, Stephen Colbert will be playing Stephen Colbert in front of a U.S. House committee hearing on illegal immigrant farm workers today. And the gullibility of the media is always a fun target.

But in the case of Phoenix and Affleck, I'm not sure I get the joke. By all accounts "I'm Still Here," which Affleck directed, is a fake documentary following Joaquin Phoenix's attempts to start a recording career as a rap artist, in the same vein as "Borat" or "Bruno." Various events like a brawl at a concert were staged with friends, and mixed in with unscripted, unrehearsed material like the Letterman interview. But since the film is still playing it straight, and meant to fuel further speculation about Phoenix's hijinks, it doesn't seem to be the end result of the project. So what is? The media reaction? The follow-up Letterman interview?

I don't think the filmmakers themselves had a clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish, and the execution of the whole scheme left much to be desired. Most of the "I'm Still Here" reviewers were either left repulsed by Phoenix's false persona or else puzzled as to its authenticity. If Phoenix and Affleck were trying to turn the tables on the media and expose its weaknesses, they have yet to succeed. The focus of the film wasn't on the portrayal of Phoenix by the media, but on Phoenix's eccentricities. Now that the hoax has been revealed, there's no ambiguity left to draw curious audiences. And it's hard to be critical of the media for its behavior when they were being so obviously baited.

Sacha Baron Cohen's guerrilla comedy was brilliant because it got people to drop their guard and react in ways that revealed hidden attitudes and hypocracies. "I'm Still Here" only got the media to shine a spotlight and invite others to gawk and speculate. There were hardly any of the usual snide tabloid insinuations you often get with Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. In fact, there was actually very little coverage of Phoenix that I remember, and much of it was various film bloggers hoping that whatever the actor was going through, that he'd come out all right. I don't think that anybody bought the act entirely, which probably contributed to the limited coverage.

I wonder if Phoenix would have found more success if he'd left off some of the more extreme changes to his appearance, like the ZZ Top beard, that signaled that something was up. Or if he'd recruited a more tempting target for the cameras, like Mandy Moore or Hilary Duff or the pop princess of you choice, to stage a more familiar kind of celebrity meltdown. Joaquin Phoenix claimed that the whole idea came from watching reality television and the skewed portrayals of people that it regularly presented as reality. Though he tried his hardest to get the media to skew his actions into something outrageous, in the end it feels like Phoenix did most of the skewing himself. And in the process, he made everyone who expressed genuine sympathy for him feel like a twit.

In any case, it's good to have Phoenix back. And I think we can all agree that David Letterman delivering a comedic smackdown of the whole affair was satisfying catharsis for everybody.