Joy’s childhood was happy and full of promise. She had a best friend, a benign half sister, loving parents and a doting grandmother. Joy was creative and imaginative, encouraged to expect a bright future. But the future fell far short of expectations. Joy’s parents divorced, her mother withdrew to her bedroom, her own marriage failed and her dead-end jobs barely made ends meet.
Jennifer Lawrence, everyone agrees, is Hollywood’s rising star. Her title role in Joy should help to distance her from young-adult action movies and erase any doubts about her range. As Joy, her body language articulates fatigue and determination; her face registers despondency, anxiety, anger, kindness, love. Only 25, Lawrence appears able to do it all.
Creative and imaginative are adjectives that describe Joy as well as Joy’s writer-director, David O. Russell, and not unlike his protagonist, not all of his bright ideas have panned out. Russell is clearly rooting for Joy, finding humor, frustration and heartbreak in this Horatio Alger girls story of the American Dream deferred and achieved.
Joy folds back and forth in time through the reminiscences of the film’s occasional narrator, Joy’s grandmother (Diane Ladd), and the protagonist’s own memories, which sometimes rearrange themselves as nightmares. The story is set amid family dysfunction and the decline of the middle class. Joy lives in the same careworn house as her grandmother, her divorced parents, her divorced husband and their children. “Hope springs eternal,” grandma insists, but no one believes her anymore. Mom (Virginia Madsen) seldom emerges from the master bedroom (“my comfort nest”), where she is lost in the dreamland of daytime soap operas. Joy’s curmudgeonly dad (Robert De Niro at his best) lives in the basement with her ex, Tony (Edgar Ramirez), an unemployed salsa singer who maintains, “You can’t let the practical get you down.” The men in her life coexist in the paneled basement rec room about as well as Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Living separately but never far away, Joy’s half sister, Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm), works for their dad. A rival for his affection, Peggy has a seemingly unconscious agenda of belittling and thwarting Joy.
Joy was inspired by the real-life story of Joy Mangano, a struggling single mom who made a fortune by inventing and marketing the Miracle Mop. Rather than tell her story in the dull fashion of a Hallmark docudrama, Russell brings creativity and imagination to the project. In his telling, the story becomes a detailed diorama of the hard-pressed lower-middle class, complete with family ties that fray but hold, a car door that opens only with a hard yank and the faded signage on dad’s auto garage, once flourishing but now floundering like many small businesses. Big corporations have rigged the game against the little guys and gals.
Russell is artful at every turn, starting with the home movie-like childhood flashback of Joy’s dog chained to a snowman (she invents a dog collar in high school but there is no money for a patent attorney). The sound of jet engines segues into the next frame: Joy on a plane, trying to hustle her Miracle Mop. The scenes in the corporate offices of the Home Shopping Network suggest vastness, alienation, anonymity.
Joy’s Christmas season release evokes Frank Capra’s holiday classic of defeat overcome by persistence, It’s a Wonderful Life. Only in Joy, the malaise of Potterville prevails for three-quarters of the film while the hopeful Bedford Falls is reduced to the final sequences. In an almost fairytale twist, Joy finds her mentor in a Shopping Network executive (Bradley Cooper) willing not only to let her peddle her mop on prime time but to do it as her authentic self, not like the usual dolled-up hustlers with clanking bracelets and “Dallas” hairdos. Balancing irony with genuine regard for the protagonist’s achievement, Joy is an often-funny, sometimes-heartbreaking tour de force of bravura filmmaking.
Joy
4 stars out of 4
Jennifer Lawrence
Robert De Niro
Directed by David O. Russell
PG-13