There’s something incredibly reductive about what Joy purports to be. Starring Jennifer Lawrence as a rags-to-riches entrepreneur, the film – based on the life of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop – flirts with interesting concepts and ideas, but is crushed beneath the weight of its ultimate goal. Director David O. Russell, behind such ingenious fantasias as The Fighter and American Hustle, has repeated in interviews that Joy marked his chance to tell a story about a woman – about “empowerment.” It’s all well and good, at the very least a noble endeavor. But it also rids Russell of his edge, his dynamic command of chaos. Joy turns maudlin by midpoint, steering clear of the complexities and nuances that make any protagonist – male, female or other – worth watching in the first place.
Indeed, despite its many mechanical issues, the root of Joy’s problems has to do with a lack of ambition and personality. This is strange for a Russell project – American Hustle rather brilliantly conceives the American success story as a caper film, while The Fighter deconstructs the boxing movie with dysfunctional family comedy – and it’s also antithetical to what he aspires to. Russell dedicates the movie to strong women (and “one in particular”), yet is without much to say about them. He provides a celebration of resilience and grit – and forces Lawrence to withstand gendered insults from Robert De Niro throughout – but he neglects to engage with those traits beyond corny dialogue and sloppy dramatics.
The flaws here are numerable, and they’re accentuated by Russell’s commitment to idolatrous storytelling. The movie opens strong, with a young Joy – divorced, mother of two, her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) living in the basement, her mother (Virginia Madsen) curled up in another room watching soaps – forced to welcome her unpleasant father (Robert De Niro) back home. If a little aimless, the cast quickly establishes the comically heightened template on which Russell thrives. Madsen and De Niro share one scene together, and it’s dynamite; individually, Lawrence shares some memorable moments with both actors. But there’s already something off. Lawrence is handed a character without detail, an area Russell normally excels in. The family can never function through any convincing prism, as Lawrence recedes while her castmates flamboyantly pop in more pronounced roles. These scenes play broadly, without any backbone.
This is a bug that starts to take serious effect as the story gets going. Barely making ends meet, getting mistreated at work and left to care for her stubbornly selfish family, Joy needs to make a miracle for herself. The mop comes into play accordingly, with a healthy amount of time dedicated to process and procedure: how to devise the thing, how to produce it, how to sell it. Aside from way too much dry talk of “mops” – seriously, Joy unwittingly ventures into infomercial territory on more than a few occasions – the film is forced to abruptly abandon its family-comedy stylings. Considering the quirks that Bradley Cooper and Mark Wahlberg were able to play throughout Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, respectively, it’s especially unfortunate that Lawrence is saddled with such dreary material. It’s as if Russell is afraid of the character – afraid of really digging in. As it stands, Joy can’t get off the ground once Joy gets off the ground. The film is stuck with a strained “Can she pull it off?” narrative that can only end one way.
Russell is smart enough to throw some surprises our direction, but that only contributes to what is fundamentally an evasive approach. Early on, Joy reunites with her best friend Jackie (Dascha Polanco), and the two look back on their lives – on the dreams that never came true. What follows is a stirring sequence theming life’s inevitable disappointments, the loves that get lost, the dreams that melt with the snow. It’s a great idea to work with, and Russell has the imagination to render it with force – yet he merely uses it as a starting point for Joy’s road to dreams-do-come-true. Later, when Joy pushes to have her Mop featured on the home-shopping network QVC, Russell pulls off a gorgeous circus of performative homemaking, with Bradley Cooper playing its ringmaster. It’s a provocative, immersive string of images, swooning and unconventional in the vein of what Russell does best. Again, however, he turns toward the simpler side of things – the fairytale.
There’s nothing wrong with a fairytale, and within another milieu, I’d be curious to see how Russell could pull it off. Here, though, he’s constantly sacrificing what has potential for the cloyingly familiar – and these are mistakes amplified by a clunky script, rife with faux-inspirational dialogue and simplistic characterizations. It’s hard to invest in such a linear narrative when Joy, as a character, registers so flatly. And there are ineffective touches to the film, including a vicious investor played by Isabella Rossellini and intermittent narration from Diane Ladd (playing Joy's grandmother), that add to the feeling of disinterest. You always know where Joy is going, but you never get a sense of what’s guiding it.
It’s also lacking energy. Although Russell usually works with a kinetic rhythm – it’s kind of his trademark – the direction here is drab and grey, padded and devoid of intrigue. (The movie also loses its sense of humor midway through.) In his attempt to realize this Cinderella story, there’s a curious absence of the mystical; rather than ethereal, the production feels dutiful and rushed, with music choices sporadically inspired and the camera never quite able to reel you in. Again, Russell does have his moments – Madsen, particularly, is a durable asset to her director, always with a new, amusing method of sulking in her twin-sized bed – but they never add up to anything significant.
Even if she manages to show off her considerable abilities, Lawrence is a bad fit for this part, unable to carry the movie that rests too heavily on her shoulders. The film tracks Joy from childhood to late adulthood, with the bulk of the content featuring her as a struggling divorced mother. I don’t mind that Lawrence is a little young – in fact, that enhanced American Hustle, in which she energetically played a character of similar (im)maturity – but her work here is without texture. Part of this is due to the thinness of the character. Yet in playing someone of such virtuous spirit and undying resiliency, Lawrence can only deliver superficially. She fails to adequately convey depth and experience.
As often happens with David O. Russell films, there are rumors behind the making of Joy: that the editors struggled until the last minute to find a movie in the footage; that Russell too aggressively rewrote the original script from Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids); and that Lawrence and her director clashed more than usual on-set. It’s all heresy, and when it comes down to the final product, none of it really matters. For a Russell-directed movie, Joy rests as an unimaginably lifeless product. The director ends on a trite flash-forward, with Joy successful, employing her confidantes as high-powered assistants, and still – good-hearted superwoman that she is – bailing out her loser relatives. She meets with a person who's sitting where she “once sat” (Joy’s words, not mine), a working class mother with an idea that could change her life. Joy tells her that she’ll pay her boss off for missing work, buy her family a suite in the Radisson and get her invention up and running. Joy continues to be a miracle-worker, in other words. But miracles can’t make a movie alone – especially, as Joy proves, if it's a movie about mops.
Grade: C-