Joy chronicles four decades in the life of Joy Mangano, whose life loosely inspired Russell’s screenplay, which he wrote based on the story he co-wrote with Annie Mumolo, the actress who co-wrote Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig. But it is the product of the team that created American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, so we have certain expectations. Oscar nominations all around. Think of it this way: It’s a movie about a dynamic inventor that isn’t particularly inventive. In a scene just this side of devastating, Joy tells her best friend how scary the knife edge of disappointment is feeling.
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Except for Lawrence, who seems at this point capable of taking on any job and making something of it, no matter what the role asks of her.
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What does make Joy disjointed is the tonal difference in how she and her family are portrayed. “My whole life is like some sort of tragic soap opera”, she says. Seeking out business advice and an investment from her father’s new girlfriend, Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) she turns to QVC and its’ product manager Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) to launch her product. The two men hate each other, naturally. She has to borrow money from her family to begin producing it. She battles against parts manufacturers.
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Although Russell has danced through several dramatic and comedic hits, most with Lawrence and Cooper, I can’t remember his intruding the drama with awkward voice over narration by Joy’s grandmother (Diane Ladd).
Though not directly. Someone spills wine and mopping it up proves a finger-cutting chore.
It’s a Cinderella story, complete with mop. She struggles to get people to believe in her and her invention as she battles against jealous family members and shady business people who are determined to get a piece of her invention and undermine her company.
Joy does play like a movie of the moment: It centers on a woman who deals with a massive wall of male derision and skepticism, yet tends to her business. One of them is a dog collar she didn’t patent in time.
That Joy is a year-end prestige picture set in a world of TV kitsch – QVC is made to be Wonderland; soap operas become hallucinatory commentaries, scathing in their condemnation – and hinges on the most mundane of cleaning chores is a beneath-the-surface bit of subversion worthy of Russell’s ever-provocative, unpredictable filmography.
Mr. Russell has specialized in crazed families from the start, with “Spanking the Monkey” and “Flirting With Disaster”, among other films; more recently Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Cooper were front and center in the most dazzling of his screwball sagas, “Silver Linings Playbook”. Russell also directed “Three Kings”.
But “Joy” is something else, a fictionalized version of an actual person’s life, so fictionalized, in fact, that the name “Mangano” is never spoken. But the script never jells; the comedy feels forced and mechanically boisterous, particularly in the crucial early passages.
Fortunately, Jennifer Lawrence’s special power is-and has been since her breakout role in “Winter’s Bone”-a preternatural simplicity that strips everything extraneous from every closeup, scene and situation”.
Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected].
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Sometimes these days we’re quick to reject the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality, but David O. Russell seems to be challenging us to see a deeper contemporary value in this.
