Movie Review: "Joy"

Joy (2015)

R

3.5 Stars out of 5

Director                                David O. Russell
Writer                                   David O. Russell
Music                                    David Campbell, West Dylan Thorsden
Cinematography                 Linus Sandgren

Jennifer Lawrence             Joy
Robert DeNiro                   Rudy, Dad
Bradley Cooper                 Neil Walker
Edgar Ramirez                   Tony, ex-husband
Diane Ladd                         Mimi, Nana
Virginia Madsen                Terry, Mom
Isabella Rosselini              Trudy, “step-mom”
Dascha Polanco                 Jackie, friend
Elizabeth Rohm                 Peggy, sister
Susan Lucci                         Danica, soap opera star
Melissa Rivers                    Joan Rivers
Jimmy Jean-Louis              Toussaint

 

2015’s “Joy” is a fictionalized account of the rise to wealth and power experienced by Joy Mangano during the 90’s. She was then a young divorced mother of three working as an airline reservations manager. Her invention of a self-wringing mop, the “Miracle Mop” started Mangano on her road to becoming a self-made millionaire. However, it was not just her inventiveness (she has over 100 patents), but it also her drive, business acumen, and association with QVC and later HSN that enabled her transition from suburban Long Island to her own mansion and business empire. In writer/director David O. Russell’s hands, “Joy” becomes a kind of modern Cinderella story complete with evil half-sister, evil quasi-step mother, and a heroine that begins her rags to riches transition with a mop. It is unfortunately and despite a scintillating performance by Jennifer Lawrence as Joy, an inconsistently told story that weaves from a “Fargo-like” surrealistic brand of humor to straight-forward drama.

“Joy” begins with a soap opera dialog in the background. This melodrama starring soap opera veterans Susan Lucci and Donna Mills will make several appearances during the first half of “Joy” with its over-the-top version of reality providing their own version of a Greek Chorus to Joy’s daily travails. And travails, she does have. Her mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen) lives in her bed watching the aforementioned soap opera doing her best to hide from the world and its presumably too harsh reality. Joy’s daughter, Christy will join her Nana in bed providing an example of childish acceptance and love. Joy’s own Nana is Mimi (Diane Ladd) and like Christy will play the role of one of the few people in this movie (other than Joy and her life-long friend, Jackie played by Dascha Polanco) with her feet firmly on the ground. Unfortunately, Russell has decided in his script to augment the soap opera counterpoint to the primary narrative with actual narrator, Mimi. Remarkably, Russell does not find even this sufficient as he will bring in an endless series of pop tunes that were chosen to also highlight some aspect of Joy’s story – the music is truly unrelenting in its intrusiveness, no matter how carefully chosen to complement the primary story.

As odd as Terry is a mother, Joy has an even stranger individual as a father, Rudy (Robert De Niro). De Niro in his all too frequent role as movie clown plays Rudy as a seriously self-centered, failed father to Joy. He will do his best along with Joy’s sister, Peggy (Elizabeth Rohm) to step on as many of Joy’s dreams as they possibly can. Rudy will do it with a false sense of apology as he tries to take the “blame” for deceiving Joy into believing too firmly in her dreams, even as he makes it plain, that it is Joy’s own inadequacies that lead into the various failures she encounters on her way to success. Peggy adopts a more familiar role, that of jealous and competitive sister to Joy. Peggy really wants Rudy’s approval and see’s Joy’s early successes at invention as a direct challenge to her own sense of self-worth.

We first meet Rudy in manic over-drive as he argues with Terry and manages to destroy a shelf full of crockery in the process. Following this fight, which Joy had watched helpless to stop, and as her own daughter cringed in the kitchen from the pseudo violence, Joy takes Rudy back in to her home and ensconces him in the basement where Joy’s own ex-husband, Tony (Edgar Ramirez) lives – even though he and Joy are two years divorced. Needless to say Rudy and Tony hate each other; something they make immediately clear to the viewer. All of these characters (with the exception of Mimi and Christy) are cardboard cartoons of characters living out cartoon versions of sitcom comedy in Joy’s house.

Russell’s script seems to intend to create a comic atmosphere of a very put-upon Joy. She is the only working member of the household besides her father (he owns a very loud auto-body repair shop located right next to an even louder gun range). She cleans up after everyone, most notably her mother who consistently clogs up the plumbing with her hair which leads to plumbing problems. Into this maelstrom will enter two more characters: Toussaint (Jimmy Jean-Louis), a Haitian plumber come to fix Terry’s plumbing and win her heart; and Trudy (Isabelle Rosselini) come to become Rudy’s fourth wife and Joy’s reluctant investor.

Joy will need an investor. She will be inspired following one more mess she must clean up to invent her miracle mop. Trudy a well-off widow will supply some of the cash along with a second mortgage on Joy’s home to get the Miracle-Mop into manufacture along with covering some unforeseen legal problems. The legal problems will come from the company building Joy’s mop hardware and will provide yet one more villain/obstacle for Joy to overcome. However, before that last hurdle must be jumped, Joy needs to find a customer base for her mops. Into the story comes Bradley Cooper as Neil Walker, head of sales at QVC.

In order for Joy to meet Neil, to get her mop on QVC, and to be successful with her mop on QVC, Joy will again have to prove her stubborn desire to succeed. She will run the corporate gauntlet at QVC (with some help from the suddenly useful Tony) to meet Neil, convince him of the mop’s value, and then of her own value as a salesperson. And here is where Joy as an individual really shines. She is not just an inventor, she is also a consummate television salesperson/personality; the movie version amps up her success in terms of initial sales of her mops. However, the reality of Joy Mangano’s actual salesmanship is astonishing: she currently routinely sells over $1M per hour on HSN, and is in fact HSN’s most successful salesperson with annual sales over $150M per year.

The issue with “Joy” is neither Lawrence’s performance nor Joy as a character; it is not the camera-work which at times is spot on; the problem is the writing/directing efforts of Russell. The movie feels like such a missed opportunity. Joy Mangano’s story is a compelling and inspiring one. Why Russell lost control over the movie’s pacing and tone in the first half is a mystery. By the time Joy meets Neil, the movie finally seems to gain its footing. The film moves from the wild swings of comedy, simple drama and surrealism (e.g. as Joy dreams at one point, she enters into the soap opera as a character),  and far too many intrusions from Nana as narrator and the various pop tunes into a serious drama about a woman determined to get her mop made and sold. There are nice touches of realism as Joy moves through an entire day with a large food stain on her blouse, nice touches of sentimentality as we see young Joy working on her early inventions, and serious scenes where Joy’s great promise as a teen was loss due to one more pull on her from her self-centered parents (their divorce in this case, which required Joy to give up college in order to come home and run the household). And especially in the movie’s second half there is great camera-work as the camera comes close with Joy’s face framed by the background and the viewer gets an up close view of Lawrence’s considerable acting talents via her subtle facial movements. There is even a fairly cool foreshadowing of Joy coming out of her cocoon of 17 years (just like the cicada’s in the book she read to Christy) in order to leave the airline and to become a business-woman. Why the crazy tone and pace changes? They simply detract from the other fine elements in this story.

Bottom-line, “Joy” is worth seeing for Lawrence’s acting alone, but also to learn little about the real Joy. Her story is inspiring and worth seeing, even in a flawed vehicle like “Joy” the movie. I recommend this movie but with reservations.