Joy (2015) [Blu-ray]
Biography | Comedy | Drama

Tagline: In America the ordinary needs the extraordinary every single day.

Joy is the wild story of a family across four generations, and centers on the girl who becomes the woman who founds a business dynasty and becomes a matriarch in her own right. Betrayal, treachery, the loss of innocence and the scars of love pave the road in this intense emotional and human comedy about becoming a true boss of family and enterprise facing a world of unforgiving commerce. Allies become adversaries and adversaries become allies, both inside and outside the family, as Joy's inner life and fierce imagination carry her through the storm she faces. Oscar Winner Jennifer Lawrence stars with fellow Oscar Winner Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Elisabeth Rohm and Dascha Polanco. Like David O. Russell's previous films, Joy defies genre to tell a story of family, loyalty, and love.

Storyline: 1995. Joy has always been fascinated by creating things, this pursuit always supported emotionally by her maternal grandmother, Mimi. Joy feels that lack of practical support has led to others making fortunes on ideas she had come up with years ago but could not act upon manufacturing. Despite being broke, Joy is the person in her extended family to who everyone has always turned, in the process forgoing her own life, including not having attended college to help see her parents through their divorce. She works in an unsatisfying job as an Eastern Airlines ticket clerk, and lives with her mother Terry who spends all day in bed watching soap operas, her ex-husband Tony, a less than successful aspiring Latino Tom Jones wannabe, and their two children. Added to this mix is her father Rudy, the owner of a failing heavy-duty garage, which is managed by Joy's older half-sister Peggy, with who she has somewhat of a strained relationship, and for which Joy does the books. Sharon, Rudy's ... Written by Huggo

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 6, 2016 Could anyone other than "it" girl Jennifer Lawrence have wrangled not just an Academy Award nomination but an actual Golden Globe win out of what is at best a pretty lightweight role like her titular turn as Joy? Joy has no outsized ambitions, and indeed Lawrence has little chance to display over the top histrionics which tend to net award season recognition (if not outright trophies). The film is a kind of a long shaggy dog story, or perhaps more accurately a "shaggy mop" story, and indeed its more or less true life tale of a harried single mother coming up with an innovative design for a household aid that few would think of as "riveting" subject material is perhaps Joy's most singular achievement. But the film ping pongs among so many characters and (admittedly interrelated) plot points that it never really achieves much in the way of momentum. Joy is never less than fun to watch, and its game cast of seasoned professionals assures a confident performance environment, but this is a rather odd third "at bat" for Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and writer-director David O. Russell, after the acclaimed Silver Linings Playbook and somewhat less rapturously received American Hustle, suggesting perhaps that the law of diminshing returns has kicked in rather pointedly.

Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence) is a harried divorcée trying to navigate the treacherous waters of shepherding her children through a relatively normal home life while also living there with her soap opera addicted mother Terri (Virginia Madsen, de-glammed like never before) and, rather incredibly, her ex-husband Tony (Édgar Ramírez), a would be pop singer whose lack of career success has relegated him to living in Joy's basement like a quasi-adult child who returns home after college when employment doesn't pan out as expected. Things get even more chaotic when Joy's Dad, Terri's ex-husband Rudy (Robert De Niro), is also forced to return home when his current main squeeze can't stand living with him anymore. Just for good measure, Joy's grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), a character who narrates the proceedings, is also on hand, though she at least seems to have Joy's best interests at heart.

Russell's screenplay quickly develops the idea that Joy has long been an enterprising inventor, including a fluorescently lit dog collar she came up with as a little girl that evidently became a hot item (the film glosses over this actually rather interesting sidebar to the main story). Dreams of a future spent thinking up and then making a vast array of items have given way to the harsh realities to everyday working life as a ticket agent at the airport, though Mimi still encourages Joy to keep dreaming. Russell probably tries a bit too hard to inject some "meaning" into the proceedings by having Joy read a story about cicadas to her daughter, a story which goes into the weird phenomenon of the insects more or less hibernating for 17 years at a stretch, something that then plays into Joy's sudden "resurgence" as an inventor (after 17 fallow years) when a shipboard accident causes her to rethink one of the most mundane items ever imagined—the everyday household mop.

That sets up the main part of the film, where Joy enlists the financial aid of Rudy's latest main squeeze, a wealthy woman named Trudy (Isabella Rossellinni), in order to create a prototype and hopefully ultimately sell her product. Joy keeps throwing obstacles at Joy for virtually the entire subsequent length of the film, with a number of nefarious types attempting to undercut her success, and her own newness to the "art of the deal" (if one might purloin a phrase from our current election cycle) also adding into the fray. She ultimately finds a partner of sorts in QVC executive Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), who sees a naturalness in Joy's demeanor which is dramatically different from the more polished and "professional" salespeople who populate his home shopping network.

Some of the more twee elements in Russell's screenplay seem awfully forced, including the whimsical narration, the aforementioned cicada reference and most weirdly Joy's "travels" into the soap opera that her mother is always watching. (These segments at least offer the blandishments of the always entertaining Susan Lucci, sending up her own long established soap operatic persona.) It's as if Russell wants to distract us from the simplicity of the story, something he's actually able to do due to persistence if nothing else.

At its core and despite a lot of stylistic flourishes, Joy is in essence nothing more than the tale of a scrappy single working woman who defies the odds and becomes a success in order to better not just her life, but that of her daughter. As such, it plays almost like a 21st century Mildred Pierce, albeit without the, you know, melodramatic murders and stuff. Russell fills the film with all sorts of nice little bits for the characters, but the overall feeling of the film is disjointed and surprisingly formulaic. Performances are winning from top to bottom, but again this is hardly material that forces its actors to stretch very far. There's an appealingly "loosey goosey" ambience to much of Joy, and it's that air of nonchalance that actually helps the film to weather some of its more rote aspects.

Joy, much like its titular character, is sweet, amiable and persistent. It's hard to know what exactly Russell wanted to convey with this film, though, for it kind of comes off as a real life "Fractured Fairy Tale", with an improbable heroine surrounded by a bunch of dunces or worse. Russell's tendency toward the overly precious and whimsical tends to undercut any suspense or ultimately true emotional attachment to the hurdles Joy faces, since the tone is so relentlessly light so much of the time. Performances keep things appropriately soufflé like most of the time, and while this is probably the least effective collaboration between Russell, Lawrence and Cooper (and/or De Niro), it still is goofily enjoyable on its own small scale terms. Technical merits are strong, and Joy comes Recommended.

[CSW] -3.8- I normally have not been happy with movies based on true stories but... Jennifer Lawrence is very relatable as Joy Mangano who knew nothing about business or "The Industry" at the time she tried launching the Miracle Mop. She is everywoman and gets plenty of bad advice. It seems like everyone tries to cheat her. She hits it through persistence and tenacity. Good for her. Many of the family scenes ring true as she trusts and believes in those close to her who know as little or less than she does. Good supporting cast, good period atmosphere. It did have a predictability to it that somehow deflates some of the action, especially in the early family scenes. If you can find the family members' bickering as humor you will enjoy this a lot more; I had a little bit of a problem with those comedic parts. With the seeming contradiction that the main character had it really takes someone special like Jennifer Lawrence to make it totally believable. It goes without saying that Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper played extremely well together as they have in their last three movies, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle,and Serena, but you probably already knew that.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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