Joy
David O. Russell has polarized me over the years. When I saw it for the first, and only, time in 1994, I hated “Spanking the Monkey,” his debut. And yet, his next film in 1996, “Flirting With Disaster,” was a film I enjoyed quite a bit, as was his Gulf War thriller, “Three Kings.” Next up was “I Heart Huckabees,” and it was a film I enjoyed parts of, but didn’t quite love. His next three films, though, won me over like they did many critics- “The Fighter,” “Silver Linings Playbook” (easily my favorite of his) and “American Hustle.” I guess that means it’s time for a letdown from him, right? Sadly, it is, and really, Russell has no one to blame but himself.
For his latest film, Russell decided to rework a script by Annie Mumolo into an odd telling of the life of Joy Mangano, who rose to fame and financial success when she invented the “miracle mop,” which self-rings, and found success selling it on the new (at the time) QVC shopping network. Rather than a straight biopic, which in and of itself might have been compelling, Russell goes back to the dysfunctional family territory he explored so well in “Flirting With Disaster” and “Silver Linings” and tries to lace it with wicked humor as Joy (played by his recent muse, Jennifer Lawrence) is put down by life and her struggling family life before her natural creativity allows her to try and make a better life for not just her extended family, but also her two kids. Unfortunately, while she was a Valedictorian in high school, and has helped her father (Rudy, played by Robert DeNiro) balance the books on his body shop, the world of business and sales is a tricky one to break in to, and difficult to learn on the fly, especially when you have people who claim they get it trying to help you out with advice. That makes a bid to sell her mop on QVC even more important; she is able to sell it to the head of the network (Neil Walker, played by Bradley Cooper), but would she be able to sell it to the public at large?
This is the third straight film Russell has made with Lawrence, and it’s obvious that they love collaborating with each other, getting Lawrence to try new things on screen we haven’t seen before. Here, however, she is frustratingly miscast. Don’t get me wrong- there are moments where she is as electric as she’s ever been in charting Joy’s story, but at 25, she’s a little too young to play a woman who seems more like in her early to mid-30s, who is divorced and has two kids on the near side of 10. What also doesn’t help is that in her best-known work to date, be it “Silver Linings” and “Hustle,” or “Hunger Games” or “Winter’s Bone,” she excels because while the characters are vulnerable, they are also steely-willed and confident in their own skin. Joy is very much not confident many times in this film, and it’s an unfamiliar mode for Lawrence. I have no doubt she will be able to display this at some point in her career, but she’s not quite there yet, and it makes it difficult to buy her in this role. It’d be easy to blame Lawrence for this, but Russell probably bares more of the responsibility, because the tone of his script does her no favors. I mentioned that the film feels a lot like “Flirting With Disaster” and “Silver Linings Playbook” earlier, and that is true, but he just can’t make those films’s dysfunctional affection for their characters work in this film, which strands a lot of terrific actors, including DeNiro, Cooper, Edgar Ramirez (as Joy’s ex-husband), Virginia Madsen (as Joy’s mother) and Isabella Rossellini as DeNiro’s wealthy new girlfriend. As Joy’s supportive grandmother, Diane Ladd fares best among the cast with hitting the beats Russell wants to hit. It is her voice narrating the story, and she helps give the film a heart that doesn’t really feel as strong as we’re used to seeing when Lawrence and Russell get together. Hopefully, the next time will see them on the same page again.