Remember last year when Joaquin Phoenix seemed to be having some sort of meltdown in public when he was meant to be promoting the movie Two Lovers? He kept talking about how he didn’t like acting, and so was going to be a rap star instead. There were uncomfortable TV appearances (most notably on Letterman), weird interviews, a disastrous rap gig, and the growth of a beard that that made him look Santa Claus’ rebellious mutant offspring.
It was all so peculiar that many (if not most people) wondered whether it was a hoax, especially as Casey Affleck was following all this with a documentary camera crew, seemingly as keen to find out why people disbelived Joaquin’s odd career move as dcoumenting it. It had the whiff of artifice – a meltdown being stage managed, with a documentary crew already there to film it and tut at the public reaction (which is course they were responsible for creating).
Well, now the movie is completed (many didn’t ever believe the documentary was real, let along Phoenix’s rap career), and Affleck (who is Joaquin’s brother-in-law) is busy trying to find a distributor. with Deadline reporting that he’s already screened it for several buyers, including the likes of Harvey Weinstein.
However debate still rages over whether the whole rap career was a set-up or not. Deadline refers to the film as a ‘mockumentary’, while also saying that the content of the film is being kept strictly under wraps for ‘maximum shock value’. However there are others who are just as convinced that while Phoenix may have overstated how his lifelong dream was to be a rapper and that’s all he wanted to do for now, they still reckon his seeming meltdown was real, especially with its mix of attention seeking and shying away from the public gaze.
Maybe it’s some sort of commentary on the public’s love of falling stars, maybe it’s all real and Phoenix is completely nuts (which to be honest, wouldn’t surprise me), or maybe Casey Affleck is evil and likes to film his brother-in-law’s self-implosion and then try to make money out of it by shopping the resulting documentary around Hollywood.
Whatever this film is – real, fake (or as I suspect, the product of two wise-asses who think they’re turning the tables on the public but are actually far less clever than they think) – it finished and should be heading our way soon.