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.

Movie Review: "Danny Collins"

Danny Collins (2015)

R

2.5 Stars out of 5

Writer/Director                  Dan Fogelman
Music                                    Ryan Adams, Theodore Shapiro               

Al Pacino                              Danny Collins
Bobby Cannavale               Tom Donnelly
Jennifer Garner                   Samantha Donnelly
Annette Bening                   Mary Sinclair
Christopher Plummer        Frank Grubman

 

“Danny Collins” is one of those movies that are almost certainly a work of love by the team that put it out. It seems probable that writer/director Dan Fogelman learned of a true life story wherein 70’s English folk singer Steve Tiltson received a letter of encouragement form John and Yoko Lennon 34 years after it was sent. I’ll presume further that he thought this would be a good basis for an Americanized version of that story. The sad truth of the matter is, though, the resultant movie feels like a highly contrived story with artificial characters and dialog all crammed into the mold suggested by the Tiltson story. The movie contains some very good acting by Al Pacino in the title role, some pleasant music if you are a John Lennon fan, some good comedic banter, but really a quite unbelievable story-line.

The film begins with a young Danny Collins (Al Pacino) just beginning his musical career as a Rock and Roll singer/composer. He is being interviewed by a fairly obnoxious editor for a Rock magazine; he’s obnoxious, but still impressed by Danny. The movie then jumps forward 40 years and we re-meet Danny. He is now very rich, very famous and seemingly very different from the idealistic artist from the 70’s as he belts out his Neil Diamond-ish hits from that era to audiences made up of fans now grown into their “golden” years. Danny knows he looks ridiculous in his flamboyant clothes and as he stands alongside his far younger girl friend. He gets blunt commentary from his even-older manager, Frank (Christopher Plummer). Frank will not hold back as he confirms (when asked by Danny) about every mistake Danny makes in his life. However, Frank is not a bad guy. In fact, he quite clearly loves Danny for reasons explained late in the movie. And he brings a present for Danny: the long lost Lennon letter. Thus ensues in this scene and a few that shortly follow some of the movie’s best acting by Pacino. The camera closes in on him as he ponders his life and now truly begins to think about paths not taken and mistakes made all too often. It’s not a bad set up for a movie.

The problem is that Danny and his fellow characters take one improbable step after another as the movie plods to its inevitable conclusion. Having decided to make changes in his life, Danny stops his tour in order to fly to New Jersey (on his private jet, of course) in an effort to link up with a son he has largely ignored for the son’s entire life. The son, Tom Donnelly (Bobby Cannavale) is a blue collar type of American Hero. He lives in a lower middle class Eden with his wife Samantha (Jennifer Garner) and their daughter Hope (what else could she be named?). As Lennon’s music peals forth, we watch Donnelly reject the father, the father try again using the grand-daughter as a kind of leverage, achieve some reconciliation, lose it through a stupid act by the father, and then (surprise!) get it back through his persistence. There’s health problems with the granddaughter, the son, some loving comments by the friend, and a potential age-appropriate (almost age-appropriate, as the movie amusingly notes) paramour and a happy ending. The decisions and too fast to believe changes in attitude that take place throughout the movie will likely annoy you as much as they did me.

That being said, Benning, Cannavale, and Plummer play their parts in a highly professional manner; each lending some verisimilitude to a script that badly needs its feet placed on the ground where real people live and interact. For example, Donnelly hates his father for having abandoned him, and yet when he is told by Danny that he sent money to Donnelly and that Donnelly’s mother rejected Danny after giving birth, Donnelly continues to hate and blame Danny for having abandoned him and his mother. Who abandoned who? It is presented as a stereotype of a self-interested Rock Star having left his responsibilities behind in his wake, but the dialog completely fails to support this concept. Later in the movie, we learn from Frank that Danny may have his flaws but he never fails to support the ones he loves in his life. Well, what is it; is he a worthless rake, or a caring man? The film simply deals in images, and they are quite frankly images that do not align well at all.

Credit is due to Pacino (Golden Globe nominee for Best Actor) for his acting and painful attempts at singing (think of Leonard Cohen on a night when he is suffering from an especially bad sore throat). He does a good job playing a role that I found to be reasonably well defined at least by Pacino’s performance. But it is a role that does not seem to belong to the movie’s counterweighing characters, his son and his family's life. Danny is a ridiculous character, but not completely for the reasons the movies want you to believe. This movie is easily skipped by anyone not thoroughly in love with Al Pacino’s acting or John Lennon’s music (the film is replete with it, and to the movie’s credit they chose songs that do align well with the scene unfurling before the viewer).

American Hustle

American Hustle

2013

Drama/Comedy

4.5 stars out of 5

David O. Russell’s “America Hustle” tells an oddly varied story of the Abscam corruption case from the late 1970’s/early 1980’s wherein six US Representatives and one US Senator were convicted of corruption. The story focuses on a fictionalized version of the con-man at the center of the FBI sting (Melvin Weinberg), a fictionalized FBI agent, and two (hopefully) fictionalized women in the con-man’s life.

The con-man, Irving Rosenfeld is played by Christian Bale as an overweight, comb-over loser/anti-hero. Bale walks a tightrope as he shows us Irving succeeding at his various cons but in complete thrall to his Jersey Shore-esque wife Rosalyn played by Jennifer Lawrence. Since it seems that everything that Lawrence does these days, she does at a performance level so far above almost all of her peers, it is no surprise to watch her as she portrays a beautiful but empty-header schemer with complete believability. Irving is smart enough to run or sense a scam on every occasion, while Rosalyn has so fooled herself that she is the smartest person in the room, she inevitably misunderstands almost every scene she is in – sometimes to comic effect, sometimes to disastrous effect.

In stark contrast, the other woman in Irving’s life is Sydney Prosser played exceptionally well (revealingly so) by Amy Adams. This ex-stripper from Albuquerque meets Irving at a pool party and its love/crime at first sight. Sydney via her oddly chosen alternate persona of Lady Edith joins Irving in his scams and ups the ante considerably in their defiance of the law. Eventually, they are trapped by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) who forces them into helping him with the Abscam sting mentioned above.

The story arc is highly entertaining and waxes and wanes between comedy and drama; it even includes a chilling portrayal of an uncredited cameo by Robert DeNiro as a Florida mobster. But in truth, this is a story of excess during a time of excess in America perpetrated by people lacking in any excesses (wealth, taste, vision) of their own. The quartet of Irving, Rosalyn, Sydney and Richie consist of people that really aren’t fooling anyone, even themselves; they are just faking it. They each are yearning for something more from life (though Rosalyn is too dense to even know what it might be), and each is willing to break any norm, any law to get it.

As I watched the movie I was reminded on several occasions of George Roy Hill’s “The Sting” (1973) starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In that movie as in “American Hustle” you have lovable anti-heroes trying to scam some truly awful people (whom in Hollywood, I guess it is morally okay to scam), and you know as you watch, there will be a double-scam wherein our heroes get away with it. Oh so Hollywood. But also like The Sting, American Hustle is an outstanding movie well worth watching for the adult level humor; but most especially for Bale, Adams’, and Lawrence’s acting, and for the inevitable coda at the end of the story arc. You want these heroes to get what they want, and well…they do.

This is definitely a movie only for adults. There is an enormous of profanity and some (let’s say) suggestive clothing.

Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies

2013

Comedy/Love Story/Horror

3.5 stars out of 5

While I am a fan of many zombie movies, I am not that big a fan of the classic Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl back three act play. But hey, put both together in one movie and I have to see it. 

You would think it tough to make the story of a zombie boy falling in love with a human girl work, but work it does. If fact, I found myself completely engaging in the couple’s story in the first reel. You can see them as zombies, and you can see them as people with human needs. At times between the laughs, you could almost tear up if you engage a little too much.

The movie tells the story of R a zombie teen played by Nicholas Hoult and the object of his desire, Julie played by Teresa Palmer. We learn of his unease at being a zombie but also of his interest in things human (a rather odd variation to Ariel’s fascination in The Little Mermaid). R must woo Julie under rather vexing circumstances, but is eventually able to do so, roughly anyway. By the third reel R has a much improved complexion, a beating heart, and a new life.

The movie has a few rough zombie thrills, but is quite frankly a really refreshing version of an old story; two old stories actually.