4 out of 10
Cast:
Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano
Robert De Niro as Rudy Mangano
Édgar Ramírez as Tony Miranne
Isabella Rossellini as Trudy
Dascha Polanco as Jackie
Aundrea and Gia Gadsby as Christie Mangano
Diane Ladd as Mimi
Virginia Madsen as Carrie
Elisabeth Röhm as Peggy Mangano
Bradley Cooper as Neil Lawrence
Jimmy Jean-Louis as Toussaint
Ken Cheeseman as Gerhardt
Directed by David O. Russell
Joy Review:
Bradley Cooper’s visionary salesman makes a statement about mid-way through Joy that people don’t listen to the first half dozen times you tell them something, but by the ninth or tenth time they’ve heard the same repeated bit of information, it starts to sink in.
This may well be very true and very useful when it comes to selling product. When it comes to art it’s a very different story, but that’s not going to stop David O. Russell from making damn sure we get what he’s trying to sell us. And what he’s trying to sell us is the life story of Joy Mangano (Lawrence), the divorced mother of two who one day decided the obstacles in her life would no longer dominate her and spent the next decade becoming a stunningly successful inventor and entrepreneur.
Those obstacles mostly come in the form of Joy’s immediate family: Joy’s agoraphobic mother (Madsen) who can’t be bothered to do more than watch soap operas and relies on Joy for her simplest needs; her frequent divorcee father (De Niro) who continually moves in with Joy so that she can take care of his books and personal problems for him; her ex-husband who still lives in the basement using Joy’s largesse to help him pursue his dream of a singing career … well, you get the point. [And if you don’t, Russell will repeat it in several other variations].
Beyond a few initial quirks which are almost never expounded on, they exist only to tell Joy she can’t do what she’s trying to do and should give up and quit for the sake of her and (more importantly) their financial well-being. The sequence of Joy pushing forward, hitting a roadblock and being told to just give up by her family (often with the exact same dialogue) happens so regularly that by the end of the film it’s possible to pinpoint when the next iteration will start.
Russell repeats scenes and dialogue so steadily it seems as if he cannot think up anything more for the characters to do or say, or else he does not trust the audience’s ability to take in the character dynamics.
Nor is Lawrence particularly free from that problem as Joy herself spends much of the film caught in a feedback loop of pursuing the latest quickly closing door and being told not to by pretty much everyone she meets. In case that’s not enough, Russell indulges in a recurring dream sequence where Joy finds herself in a nightmare version of her mother’s favorite soap opera (also about an oppressed woman whose family won’t let her be herself) where she is forced into a life of routine for eternity. Considering Joy spends all of her waking hours having the same point chiseled into her forehead, the need of a dream sequence to do the same seems small.
Lawrence remains a compelling actress — she makes more of her dialogue work than it should, considering most of it is a reiteration of the fact that she made her mop, including the three-hundred feet of cotton strands in the head, with her own two hands. Worse than that, however, is the fact there are some compelling ideas in Joy, and some equally-excellent moments, which serve mostly to highlight how lacking all of the other material is.
That’s because they are largely concentrated around Joy’s work at the QVC after an old acquaintance of her ex-husband helps get her a meeting with the fledgling networks chief executive (Cooper). Cooper and Lawrence continue to have excellent screen chemistry and Russell’s best tools – they make thirty minutes of exposition about how QVC works the most compelling part of the movie, and that is no back-handed compliment.
Watching the underpinnings of American sales culture be explained with the reverence and foresight of religion is fantastic and Russell squeezes every moment of magnificence he can from it. When Joy returns to try her own hand at selling her products, the result is legitimately stand-up-and-cheer satisfying, particularly as she refuses to go out as anyone other than her own self. “I wear a blouse and slacks, that’s who I am,” she says, her self-realization as an individual of worth finalized.
Rather than lift Joy from the mire, these moments merely reinforce how unsurprising and frequently bad the rest of the film is and what a waste of time the whole enterprise has been. Particularly the third act as everyone who was previously telling Joy she’d never succeed promptly start trying to steal her success from her once she does.
In its efforts to squeeze basic emotional responses from the audience, Joy forgets to earn them. It is genuinely refreshing to see a film so thoroughly committed to the idea of the inner life of an adult woman whose hopes and dreams have nothing to do with meeting a man or getting married and where no romantic subplot ties into her resolution. There is definitely a need for such films but Joy is not one of them. Mostly it’s a slog, offering few surprises and doing little to live up to its title or aspirations.
But a film about the founding of QVC? I would watch the crap out of that.
Joy
-
Joy
