Joy

Synopsis: Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is divorced, in a dead-end job and living with her neurotic mother (Virginia Madsen), grandmother (Diane Ladd) and two children.  If having her ex- (Edgar Ramirez) living in the basement is not enough, her father, Rudy (Robert De Niro), turns up in need of a roof over his head. When Joy invents a new type of floor mop she is sure it will be the break she needs. Trouble she doesn’t yet know about lies ahead.

Much like David O. Russell’s previous film, American Hustle (there was another film, Accidental Love, which was released in between but it was largely filmed in 2008 and Russell disowned it), Joy is a take on the American Dream. 

Unsurprisingly, given that they have the same cinematographer (Linus Sandgren) and production designer (Judy Becker) the films have a similar visual style whilst the presence of Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, all who appeared in Hustle, even further tie them together as companion pieces. But whilst Joy is, to coin a phrase, enjoyable, it does not have the same spark as the earlier film. Much of this is down to the script by Russell from a story which he co-wrote with Annie Mumolo who co-wrote Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig.  Like Hustle It is entertainingly convoluted with a panoply of zany characters but it is less consistent in tone and looser in execution than that film.

Joy shifts about from satire, to comedy to drama without ever committing itself to one mode.  In one early scene Robert De Niro takes the film to its comedic height by engaging in a slanging match with Virginia Madsen, but it never goes there again, De Niro falling back on his now over-familiar likeable curmudgeon schtick. Rather, with its recurring parodies of daytime television and corporatized consumerism, satire is the dominant tone. But then Lawrence is presented as a sympathetic, indeed near-heroic, Rock-of-Gibraltar character, and, as the presumably seriously-intended opening titles suggest, the story is supposed to serve as a testament to her as an emblem for women who dare to try.

So Russell has us seriously empathizing with Joy and her battles in a male-dominated world.  But then again, although Russell gives Joy her triumph he is apparently not willing, or at least so it seems, to boost her as a zero-to-hero screen heroine à la Erin Brockovich but sets about showing us the hollowness of success as she ends up a kind of Mildred Piece figure, alone in a huge, empty house estranged from her family, who returning to the comedic note, to paraphrase Woody Allen, have tried to squeeze her out of her own corporation.

Always at the heart of things, Lawrence is a winning presence as the determined young woman whilst Cooper is well-suited to the part of her mentor in the mechanics of consumer capitalism, their scenes together being amongst the best in the film.  Isabella Rossellini is, however, the stand-out as Joy’s father’s girlfriend, Trudy. Her role however points to one of the issues with the script: the ease with which the plot unfolds. Trudy appears out of nowhere, makes a  critical contribution to the development of Joy’s story but then does little else for the rest of the film.  Most insistent in this respect is the “get-out” by which Joy saves herself from bankruptcy in the film’s final stage, turning around, in what feels like a very unlikely scenario that takes a couple of minutes to execute, a narrative which had appeared to end up in diametrically-opposed direction to that which Russell had intended (although the film is based on a real life story, there is little realism here).   

If Joy doesn’t hang together entirely convincingly (that four editors are credited indicates the amount of post-production shaping that was involved), indeed, it is hard to tell how Russell wants us to view the story (is the film's title ultimately meant ironically, one wonders), the director's skill ensures that we are carried along by the roller-coaster ride of a story and its flakily entertaining characters.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?