It's a David O. Russell movie, take it or leave it. Despite lacking much of its titular emotion, Joy is a love letter to both women and capitalism, complex in its emotional terrain but trying really, really hard to be the feel-good movie of the season.
Leave it to Russell to let the movie rest on Jennifer Lawrence's performance. She nails it, as we might expect, and does so with great fortitude and endurance. But she also isn't given much to work with. Based on the real life story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop, the movie follows its protagonist through her dysfunctional household and her repeatedly sabotaged business breakthroughs to her final victory. Lawrence pushes through her chores with verve in what might be the best Cinderella story we've seen in the last few years. Which really isn't saying much.
And what a Cinderella story it is, one replete with Russell trademarks: bizarre character turns, dialogue that tries to be more important than it is, and occasional outbursts of cathartic, comedic agony. While I say it reads as a love letter, I don't mean to ignore the rather caustic worldview Russell still employs in his films. It's a profoundly melancholy look at a particular slice of American life, far from the reaches of the upper crust. Unlike this year's earlier Cinderella, this film doesn't delude itself into playing a classist irony, nor does it prevent its characters from articulately exploring their motivations. But that doesn't relieve the tension we feel looking at the generations of a dysfunctional family living in the same small house, with the charming but lazy ex-husband in the basement, the monstrous father attempting to reclaim some lost power, the knowing grandmother who cares for everyone in her own small ways. It's claustrophobic and noisy, with bits of dialogue (probably partially improvised, as in American Hustle) shouted and overlapping in its own perverse kind of musical score.
I think my only real takeaway from this movie is that it's not as cerebral or artful as Russell's last two hits, but it really wants to be. It's stylized and interesting, to be sure, but in a way more befitting a coming-of-age story or an adventure movie than a family drama or even a feminist manifesto. It's got good performances that are mostly washed over by cheap dialogue and meandering, inconsistent plot devices that turn the film into a tonally chaotic mess. And the final act plot turn (a watered-down deus ex machina) is so gimmicky that I found it hard not to snort aloud in the theater.
IMDb: Joy
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