Joy

I confess an approach with a negative a priori. Having not really enjoyed Happiness Therapy (David O. Russell, 2012), I feared a film gathering the same director with the same main actors. And I was definitely wrong! First, Jennifer Lawrence plays admirably, and is excellently assisted by Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen and Isabella Rossellini. This film is also a fabulous and inspirational advocacy to an escape attempt from a disadvantaged environment filled with zombies (the mother Terry in particular, and the father Rudy to a lesser extent) thanks to an obstinacy skilfully measured out and the wise help of her former husband Tony. This movie is invigorating!

David O. Russell has made some lovely films with Jennifer Lawrence, such as "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle". And here, with Lawrence once again, he's given her an excellent role (that resulted in an Oscar nomination) but that's really about all. Unlike the other films, the rest of the characters are so unlikable and nasty that watching the film is akin to pouring salt into your eyes.....it's just not particularly nice nor pleasant. Now the characters in these other films were not exactly nice folks...but you felt compelled to watch them. Not as much here...mostly because these other characters tend to dominate the story instead of accentuating it in "Joy".

Joy is a character originally envisioned as a biography of real-life Joy Mangano--a woman who invented some labor-saving household items which have made her rich. But as the script was written, the story began to diverge more and more and more from Mangano's life...to the point where it's mostly fiction.

In this story, Joy (Lawrence) is the glue that tries to hold her very dysfunctional and chaotic life together. And, it's tough considering that Joy's family has little in the way of boundaries and Joy is working her butt off. For example, her parents divorced long ago...yet the pair moved in with Joy....and bring chaos to her life as they fight AND the parents both bring their boyfriends/girlfriends into the home! The bottom line is that practically everyone in the family makes great demands on Joy and they don't seem to care that this is destroying her. And, frustratingly, Joy is practically incapable of telling any of these jerks no! I think too much of the film focuses on this chaos, as I found myself tense and frustrated watching her life. I just wanted these folks to go away!

Eventually, like the real Joy, this Joy manages to take her great ideas and market them...and make money from them. Too bad she didn't use this money and power to get restraining orders to keep everyone from her family out of her life. And, too bad it took so long and we needed to cringe constantly at the family until this breakthrough EVENTUALLY occurred. But even then, the family seems to do their best to make Joy's idea fall flat.

The bottom line is that it can be tough to sell a story where you don't like anyone. It can work...but it's an uphill battle...and here it just didn't work well for me. And, I can see why this Russell film didn't do as well in theaters as his other collaborations with Lawrence....making less in the States than it cost to make. As it is, it's watchable but a bit of a disappointment. Slow and not at all a joy to watch! It at least earns a 5 because there are some nice performances. The film MIGHT have worked better had the first half of the movie been reduced significantly and the final portion accentuated further.

Blue-collar visionary Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) has an idea for a revolutionary new home-cleaning product. With the help of her failed lounge singer ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez) and despite the machinations of her crazy family she pitches the product to a home shopping channel mogul (Bradley Cooper).

The film Joy is what you would get if ingested psychedelic mushrooms, wrote an infomercial about Miracle Mop and got an excellent cast of Hollywood stars to appear in it. Nothing is more absurd than the very idea of this movie getting made as a wide release feature with the exception of the inexplicable critical acclaim it has garnered.

Auteur David O.Russell (Who wrote, produced & directed) has been so successful in recent years with films like Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle that it has perhaps made him complacent and even bored. Sometimes when that happens an artist can go off on an experimental tangent. Equally as often the same artist can take on a challenge that they shouldn't. That is what Russell did here in trying to turn an idea that wouldn't normally have been considered for a movie of the week on the Lifetime network and making a feature film out of it.

I feel like seeing it again just to make sure the actors were really saying the goofy lines of dialogue I heard. Some of them appear to be gleaned from a motivational speaker's teleprompter. Others sound like what you hear in a dubbed version of an awful Mexican soap opera. I'm embarrassed for the distinguished cast that they had to try to make sense of this weirdness.

Tinged with Fellini-esque surrealism the bizarre rhythm of sequence suggests it was absolutely butchered during editing by somebody on speed, then Ritalin, then speed again. I often found it incoherent. It probably made perfect sense to drug users.

If the film accomplishes one thing it is that everyone who sees it is gonna wanna buy a Miracle Mop. I started scouting for one online right after I saw it.

Joy is a fine half a film. The performances all-around are strong, the story is uncommon enough to grab your attention, and keep you invested, and the direction is solid. With all that in mind, Joy still feels like a shallow version of what could have been. There is a reason why all the movie's Oscar buzz has all but dissipated in every category except a courtesy nod to Jennifer Lawrence as Best Actress; Why? You should read on.

Lawrence plays the titular character, a mother of two with a very complicated home life. Though divorced, her ex-husband (Ramirez) lives in the basement waiting for his singing career to take off. Though she has decidedly negative relationships with her parents, her shut-in mother (Madsen) lives with her and her father (De Niro) is a serial divorcée with a struggling auto repair shop. It's also the 1980's and she works the night shift for an Airline that's dramatically cutting back hours; yikes. The only thing she has going for her is she likes to tinker and has the work ethic to see a good idea through. So when she has a eureka moment after a failed excursion on her father's new girlfriend's boat, she quickly invents a household object that may just be her ticket out of systemic poverty.

I don't think I'm giving much away by saying the movie asks its audience to hinge their emotional cache on a mop. The self-wringing Miracle Mop to be exact, invented by honest-to-God real person Joy Mangano. Leave it to director David O. Russell to find a decent story in the life of a QVC luminary and keep it just this side of rational. The prologue of the film lovingly dedicates the movie to "daring women," which Joy certainly is but Russell wisely omits the last name to give the audience a universality. This too can be your story of success if you have grit and a good idea. It's a great theme sadly worth a much better movie.

Part of the problem is the pace. There are long stretches of improvisations that carry absolutely no emotional weight. Unlike American Hustle (2013) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012) where the rushed, overlapping dialogue and melodramatic mugging serves to highlight the immediacy of, say dealing with the mob, here there's nothing holding us to the characters and their goals...except Joy. Russell seems to be aware of his own style and juxtaposes the lives on screen with an 80's era soap opera which consumes the life of Joy's mother. The parallel is interesting in theory but the results deflate the proceedings.

Not usually the voice of hope, I really wanted to like this movie. A movie about the positives of hard work and entrepreneurship has not hit theaters since Pursuit of Happyiness (2006). Yet out of all modern directors working today, David O. Russell feels like a quixotic mouthpiece for such a hopeful theme. His movies always have an unabashed pessimism about human nature that undermines his characters with an almost Bunuelian sense of treachery. Even as far back as his Three Kings (1999) days there was a mercurial, bittersweet undercurrent to his work. Joy bares disappointment after disappointment to a breaking point most protagonists of this genre would buckle under. Then, as if to put a band-aid on an open gash, the movie ends with an epilogue that's pat to the point of flimflam.

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This is a supposedly "inspirational" kind-of movie based on the life of Joy Mangano a business woman and inventor of home products.

As I'm reading this is far from the actual life of Mangano (who, unlike the Joy in the movie, she went to University and has a degree in business administration). It is more like a blend of the stories of other housewives turned to businesswomen (if you can believe that) and contains lots of fictional elements for dramatic purposes.

Nevertheless the plot is weak. So is the script. There isn't any actual moral here (like "Try and you will succeed"), and the narration of her grandmother dilutes any of that "moral" with too much "it is your destiny" crap.

Soooo, the movie is an empty shell (or should I say Sell, pun intended) but is it fun to watch? No. Not really.

The characters (including Robert De Niro's who plays her father, Elisabeth Röhm's who plays her half-sister, Virginia Madsen's who plays her mother and Isabella Rossellini's who plays her father's girlfriend and serves as the initial investor) are heavily unsympathetic.

The direction is blunt, the pace uneven (I wont spoil you but the resolution of all problems comes in just a few seconds near the end), the situations unbelievable (like going to the...bathroom and unveil a conspiracy by pure luck) etc.

Overall: A blunt movie with weak script and plot. The unsympathetic characters also make this unbearable. Not fun to watch and no true moral in this fictitious sequence of events.