Joy
(2015)
(SPOILERS) The one where the magical
formula that was working so well for David O Russell, since he stopped making
distinctive movies and instead ploughed a furrow of awards-friendly ones (which
isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy most of them to a degree, but pushing any kind of
envelope apart from the one containing his big fat fee they were not), ran dry.
Joy’s a compendium of everything
Russell assumed was right with his picture going wrong, from eager stars on tap,
to air-punching emotionally-uplifting plot twists, to blindingly obvious
soundtrack choices.
This very loose account of Miracle Mop inventor
Joy Mangano (so much so, her surname isn’t referenced) charters a divergent
course in order that Russell can wing it with his medley of favourite moves.
But the result is an unwieldy mess. His unbeatable run with Jennifer Lawrence
(as Joy) runs aground fairly decisively. She’s decent, strong even, on a
scene-by-scene basis, but utterly fails to convey a believable character. In
part this is because Russell utterly fails to convey a believable world around
her, but it’s also because, more unforgivingly than in their previous
collaborations, she’s just too damn young for the part. There’s a point here
where, no matter how talented she is (and I do think she’s talented), she’s
just plain unconvincing as a thirtysomething mother and all-round family can-do-er,
standing up to umpteen obstacles in her path. That’s just the most glaring of
numerous problems, though.
Such as, you wonder just what Russell is
trying to achieve, because if it’s in the service of the rewards garlanded for
(female) aspiration, dedication and persistence in the face of the odds,
reducing that achievement to an ill-formed final five minutes seems straight-up
peculiar. Everything Joy does involves a rebound of pain and anguish, all of it
crudely signposted in advance, and it feels almost as if this Russell’s token
gesture towards the non-mainstream filmmaker he once was, wrapped in a sugar-coated
bow; it’s that cynical.
The picture kicks off as an annoying
two-dimensional character tour de force, going for the heightened and
cartoonish in a way the writer-director can’t pull off (he isn’t a Burton or a
Jeunet). And so, the parades of motley family members, their quirks and
obsessions, is merely irritating. The blending of fantasy and reality (Joy
imagines herself in the soap opera her mother obsesses over) flat out stinks
(yet this is the guy who played with reality so deliriously in I Heart Huckabees).
Admittedly, it’s interesting to see
Virginia Madsen playing something different (although Russell can only offer her
clichéd subplots, such as an attraction to a Haitian plumber), and Elisabeth
Rohm is absolutely full-on as Joy’s bitchy half-sister. But Robert De Niro
crashes and burns so badly in an “Is he even awake?” half-embalmed performance,
you can only assume Russell keeps using him because of some presumed kudos still
attached to the name.
This is what you get when a director thinks
he can do no wrong. And it’s pretty difficult to root for said filmmaker when
he’s still up to the kind of bastardly behaviour he subjected Lilly Tomlin to a
decade ago (only this time with Amy Adams). Joy’s
punctured balloon feels like hubris well met. The picture does, momentarily,
begin to find a foothold when Bradley Cooper enters the scene as a QVC director
who becomes Joy’s salvation (even he has to be a stinker to her to get to that
point, though; the whole thing is so calculated, at a certain point the
tribulations no longer have any weight; oh look, grandma – ghostly narrator
Diane Ladd, who instilled in her that achiever-ethos, the angel – is dead, cue
some grieving).
After that, the plot dissembles into
further family traumas for Joy; even the payoff of her putting paid to her
fraudulent manufacturer lacks the oomph it should. She loves her family
unconditionally, but the picture never really shows her standing up to them the
way she should; indeed, the coda suggests that, far from being an aspirational
figure, she’s a pushover, funding their failed schemes and getting sued by her
malignant father (De Niro now even more ridiculous in old age make up than his
earlier computer-assisted de-aging) for ownership of the mop.
It’s almost as if Russell thinks he can
fashion a hit by selecting a true life story from any magazine article he’s
handed, simply by pasting in vague platitudes about perseverance and self-belief
(perhaps we could all achieve the American Dream if it weren’t so plagued by
ne’er do wells?) Accordingly, he appears to have stuffed as much emotional
banality into Joy as possible, hoping
it would leaven into some kind of sense in the edit. Instead, the tonal and
thematic mishmash merely results in exasperation.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
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