You were born to be the unanxious presence in the room.

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.

Comments

We live in a twilight world.

Tenet (2020)
(SPOILERS) I’ve endured a fair few confusingly-executed action sequences in movies – more than enough, actually – but I don’t think I’ve previously had the odd experience of being on the edge of my seat during one while simultaneously failing to understand its objectives and how those objectives are being attempted. Which happened a few times during Tenet. If I stroll over to the Wiki page and read the plot synopsis, it is fairly explicable (fairly) but as a first dive into this Christopher Nolan film, I frequently found it, if not impenetrable, then most definitely opaque.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds. Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

The protocol actually says that most Tersies will say this has to be a dream.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)
(SPOILERS) The Wachowski siblings’ wildly patchy career continues apace. They bespoiled a great thing with The Matrix sequels (I liked the first, not the second), misfired with Speed Racer (bubble-gum visuals aside, hijinks and comedy ain’t their forte) and recently delivered the Marmite Sense8 for Netflix (I was somewhere in between on it). Their only slam-dunk since The Matrix put them on the movie map is Cloud Atlas, and even that’s a case of rising above its limitations (mostly prosthetic-based). Jupiter Ascending, their latest cinema outing and first stab at space opera, elevates their lesser works by default, however. It manages to be tone deaf in all the areas that count, and sadly fetches up at the bottom of their filmography pile.

This is a case where the roundly damning verdicts have sadly been largely on the ball. What’s most baffling about the picture is that, after a reasonably engaging set-up, it determinedly bores the pants off you. I haven’t enco…

James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.

Moonraker (1979)
Depending upon your disposition, and quite possibly age, Moonraker is either the Bond film that finally jumped the shark or the one that is most gloriously redolent of Roger Moore’s knowing take on the character. Many Bond aficionados will no doubt utter its name with thinly disguised contempt, just as they will extol with gravity how Timothy Dalton represented a masterful return to the core values of the series. If you regard For Your Eyes Only as a refreshing return to basics after the excesses of the previous two entries, and particularly the space opera grandstanding of this one, it’s probably fair to say you don’t much like Roger Moore’s take on Bond.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991)
(SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

My dear, sweet brother Numsie!

The Golden Child (1986)
Post-Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy could have filmed himself washing the dishes and it would have been a huge hit. Which might not have been a bad idea, since he chose to make this misconceived stinker.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

I don’t think you will see President Pierce again.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
(SPOILERS) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and other tall tales of the American frontier is the title of "the book" from which the Coen brothers' latest derives, and so announces itself as fiction up front as heavily as Fargo purported to be based on a true story. In the world of the portmanteau western – has there even been one before? – theme and content aren't really all that distinct from the more familiar horror collection, and as such, these six tales rely on sudden twists or reveals, most of them revolving around death. And inevitably with the anthology, some tall tales are stronger than other tall tales, the former dutifully taking up the slack.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog