Joaquin Phoenix’s One-Man Cult of Depressive Method-Acting Vanity

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What is Joaquin Phoenix so unhappy about? And so twitchy? We’ve all seen someone triumph at the Oscars and use their acceptance speech to push a social cause (in fact, it’s almost required).

But I’ve never seen a speech quite like the one Phoenix gave in 2020 when he took the best actor award for “Joker.” The film had gotten mixed reviews from critics (what were they so unhappy about?), so the win carried an element of vindication.

Yet Phoenix treated the moment like a plea of desperation combined with a dirge. Stroking his face and beard with that slightly manic pensive concern, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively.” Then, in a free-form ramble about the various modes of injustice, and how they’re really all the same, he observed that “many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric worldview, the belief that we’re the center of the universe.” His big example of this? “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable.” He then harangued those of us who put that cow’s milk “in our coffee and our cereal,” at which point I began to wonder: When was the last time an Oscar speech made me feel this bad? (And I was one of the few critics who loved “Joker.”) Phoenix’s own cry of anguish was (and is) unmistakable.

It has become the defining note of his onscreen presence. He’s an actor who, if you look at any one of his movies, seems to be performing on the high wire, going way, way off the beaten track, to inner places both radical and revelatory.