The Joaquin Phoenix-starring movie I’m Still Here represents a sticky wicket for My Year of Flops. It’s such an odd, unclassifiable project that it’s hard to even ascertain what the benchmarks for its success or failure might be. It was never going to gross $100 million or sweep the Oscars. It’s not that kind of a film. In fact, it’s hard to figure out what kind of a film it ultimately is. Yet I’m Still Here fits the parameters and vibe of My Year Of Flops in that it was largely, if not exclusively, processed as a profound and extremely public humiliation, a regrettable experiment that took up far too much of a talented actor’s time and mind. It certainly wasn’t received as an Andy Kaufman-like masterpiece of mind-bending post-modernism.
When I’m Still Here appeared, the cultural consensus seemed to be that Phoenix was a talented man behaving like a naughty boy and wasting everybody’s time with his post-modern pop-art foolishness and should go sit in a corner and think long and hard about what he did. Phoenix’s history lends the film a disturbing personal edge: What kind of lunatic makes a film depicting himself as a coke-snorting, booze-swilling pothead when his own brother famously died of a drug overdose outside the Viper Room at age 23? The whole misadventure was in perhaps questionable taste.
I’m Still Here hijacked Phoenix’s career and sent it hurtling in a bizarre, unprecedented new direction. Seemingly overnight, Phoenix went from being perceived as an unusually intense actor from a famously troubled family to a crazed, culture-mashing pop-art provocateur. He stopped being an actor and turned into a character. Beyond that, he became a pop-culture punchline and a popular Halloween costume. I’m Still Here will follow Phoenix for the rest of his life. It will be a long time before we can go to a new Joaquin Phoenix movie and not think of Rasputin-like beards, chewing gum, and the actor’s make-pretend descent into madness.
In some respects, celebrity has become its own art form in the 21st century, and I’m Still Here stands as one of the most subversive, insightful commentaries on that phenomenon. It explores a distinctly new form of narcissistic madness, an intense, web-fueled egotism bolstered by the demands of a 24/7 news cycle that insists everything celebrities do is news, whether that means going to get a gelato with a girlfriend or murdering a spouse. Before I’m Still Here came around, the Hollywood satire was moribund. It had lost whatever power and freshness it once possessed. We’d heard the stories too many times. We know that actresses exploit their sexuality to get ahead, agents are greedy, actors vain, directors eccentric, and writers tend to drink and aren’t treated in a terribly respectful fashion by the directors with whom they work. We needed new stories. More than that, we needed a new kind of movie. So Phoenix and co-conspirator/director/co-writer Casey Affleck decided to make a bold new cinematic experience that was part prank, part mockumentary, part real-time mindfuck, part quasi-confessional, and part eviscerating psychodrama.
Plenty of pop-culture rubberneckers pegged I’m Still Here as fake from the beginning, but when it was screened for critics, about half the reviews assumed it was an unblinking, disturbing portrait of a man’s emotional and spiritual breakdown. “Is it real?” became the dominant question. But I’m more interested in what Phoenix and Affleck are trying to convey about the poisonous narcissism of celebrity culture and the way it alienates you from your better angels.
Much of the film deals with Phoenix’s antagonistic, inherently one-sided relationship with his personal assistant. The personal assistant, like most, nurses artistic dreams of his own. His muse tells him that he was put on earth to sing and dance and play guitar and tell stories. The universe, however, is telling him that his destiny is to bring Joaquin Phoenix his fucking cappuccino and be quick about it, since Phoenix is the one signing the checks and paying the bills. That has to be heartbreaking even if your boss didn’t broadcast his contempt for you and your art at every possible interval. Fame is inherently alienating. It lifted Phoenix into a rarified realm where he was treated like a giant, overgrown baby. Like a baby, people assume that celebrities are fragile and important and should not have to do even the most basic human actions. They are far too important to fetch their own cup of water; someone else must attend to that task and do so with a smile and a positive attitude.
There’s something perverse about the idea of a personal assistant, someone seemingly placed on earth solely to serve someone society tells them is more important and valuable than them. Personal assistants are supposed to protect achingly fragile and incredibly busy employers. They also serve as barriers that keep their bosses from having to interact with the outside world and have conversations that might prove healthy and important. (Like, for instance, a conversation that might include the phrase “Joaquin, you need help.”). They keep their bosses in a safe bubble of total self-absorption. Within that bubble, which reflects onto itself for eternity, the Joaquin Phoenix character of I’m Still Here grows ugly and mean.
His handsome visage is hidden behind a Unabomber beard and dark sunglasses. A beer belly hangs over his gut. He wears sunglasses all the time. And he has decided that he is going to quit acting, something he is quite good at and for which he has been rewarded handsomely, to pursue a career as a rapper, something he knows nothing about. Actors are inherently inauthentic. They put on costumes and pretend to be other people using words not written by them. Here Phoenix sees hip-hop as the inverse of acting. In his pot-, coke-, and fame-addled mind, rappers are paragons of authenticity and free expression.
This is, of course, ludicrous. The main difference between rappers and actors is that rappers are way more into role-playing and posturing and trying out different personas. If anything, rappers are ragingly inauthentic. With delicious irony, Phoenix ultimately hooks up with hip-hop’s preeminent paragon of inauthenticity: Sean “Diddy” Combs. Combs has wicked comic timing: The scene where Phoenix plays him a song and Combs listens with a look that combines mild mortification with a pragmatic desire to make the best of a bad situation is a masterpiece of deadpan comic understatement.