If you've seen this movie it seems you either think the dude has totally lost it, and he's lost it so bad, he's so clueless, he doesn't realize how bad he looks in this "documentary," - fat, self-aborbed, whiny, petty, ridiculous; exhibiting all the behaviors of the worst sort of debauched Frat Boy, with delusions of Hip Hop glory.Or you think this is all just superb acting. Maybe the best acting performance since Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. A seamless performance, where Joaquin Phoenix risks it all to portray a character of our time, the time of our berserk celebrity culture. A character he totally inhabits to the nth degree.
And if you go with the second interpretation, and I do, then you realize this is just a brilliant movie that uses the whole celebrity machine in the most subversive way. So even as everyone was wondering what the hell happened to Joaquin, ("Is he really off the rails, is he really chucking his acting career just when he reached the top of his game?"), he and Casey Affleck have constructed a movie that exposes the whole Hollywood myth-making machine, and plays with the expectations of a celebrity industry that loves to eat people whole and spit them out.
The movie is funny, and makes you think, and tests your patience, and makes you marvel at someone willing to risk everything for a role. I mean, someone even willing to demean his own image, his own "brand" in a culture where brand is everything.
Superb, thrilling, silly. Excellent. A great companion movie to The Social Network. These are movies of the moment.
The last sequence in "I'm Still Here," when Joaquin "walks the river" is beautiful and dare I say it "metaphorical." And transcendent.
