David O Russell  (2015)

The inventor and business entrepreneur Joy Mangano was born in New York in 1956. According to Wikipedia, her first invention was a fluorescent flea collar for pets, which the teenage Mangano thought up while working at an animal hospital on Long Island. After graduating from Pace University with a degree in business administration in 1978, Mangano married and had three children. The marriage ended in 1989. The following year, she made her name and started to make her fortune as the inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop. She currently holds more than a hundred patents for her inventions. In an interview with the New York Times in 2007, Mangano was quoted as follows:

‘I think my products have been successful because they have mass appeal … I’m just like everybody else out there. I’m a mom, I work, I have a house to clean, things to organize. We all have certain similar needs, and I address them.’

Although I’m not a fan of David O Russell, he’s always seemed to know what he wants – and what he’s doing to get what he wants. In that respect, his movie about the life of Joy Mangano is a new departure. It’s a puzzle as to why it stutters, although I noticed in the closing credits that Mangano was one of the executive producers and wondered if her involvement in the project might have somehow constrained Russell. (He wrote the screenplay too, as he usually does, though The Fighter was an exception to that rule.) Mark Kermode has described Joy as ‘all over the place’; he’s right in that it lacks rhythm and a secure tone, but it’s thin too. I don’t know which of the supporting characters are invented or, if they’re based on Joy Mangano’s family et al, how closely they’re meant to resemble their real-life counterparts – but most of the people in Russell’s movie each have a single characteristic – ridiculous or nasty or money-obsessed. They’re nothing more than a collection of obstacles for the heroine to overcome. There’s little suspense or surprise involved in watching her win through. There’s pleasure and enjoyment, however, since Joy is played by Jennifer Lawrence.

Although she’s expected to carry the film – which she does, effortlessly – you sense that Lawrence isn’t being stretched here. There are times when she seems to be going through the motions – particularly in the weak last half-hour, when Joy takes on the manufacturer who’s attempting fraudulently to patent her mop design. It may be that Lawrence gives this impression because she remains an instinctive and a truthful performer: the truth is that, by this stage, Russell’s script is going through the motions. There are plenty of charming things in her performance, though – as when Joy does her first sketches for the Miracle Mop and, especially, when she’s advertising it on the QVC shopping channel. What Joy Mangano said to the New York Times was no doubt designed to reinforce her ‘brand’ but Jennifer Lawrence captures completely the straightforward personality that Mangano’s words suggest. Lawrence’s own mass appeal derives from an ability to make straightforward behaviour charismatic and off-the-wall behaviour believable. Lawrence’s work in Joy doesn’t compare with what she did in her two other Russell pictures, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Even so, if this were her first starring role, you would be bowled over.

Russell has got together a stellar cast to play the satellites to Joy but most of them are wasted. As Joy’s repeatedly divorced father Rudy, Robert De Niro at first comes across as nearly deranged – when Rudy’s latest wife chucks him out and, in a flashback, when he delivers an atrabilious father-of-the-bride speech at Joy’s wedding reception. These loco displays don’t link to anything that follows and the less volatile Rudy is hardly explained by his new relationship with the wealthy Italian widow, Trudy, who helps to fund then nearly to wreck Joy’s business venture. Isabella Rossellini is vivid and amusing in her first scenes but, once Russell has reduced Trudy to a crass mercenary, she can only repeat herself. The opportunities available to Virginia Madsen (as the heroine’s TV-soap-addicted mother) and Elisabeth Röhm (Joy’s competitive, treacherous stepsister) are even more limited. Diane Ladd is Joy’s loyal, inspiring grandmother: this character also delivers a turgid voiceover narration from, it transpires, beyond the grave. (The consecutive sequences involving the grandmother’s death and funeral are especially ropy.) Russell is kinder to Aundrea Gadsby, who plays Joy’s smart little daughter Christy, but the only family character who develops interestingly is Joy’s husband, Tony Miranne. When he and Joy first meet, Tony has ambitions of being a singing star – ‘the next Tom Jones’ – and see he seems a vain fool. Once he’s become an ex-husband, Tony turns out to be a lot less stupid and a lot more supportive than you expected. Edgar Ramirez plays him well.

I assume that Neil Walker, the QVC executive in the movie, is an invented character and that Russell wrote the character with a view to getting Bradley Cooper to play him and renew his screen partnership with Jennifer Lawrence. If so, it was a good decision. The episode focusing on the marketing of the Miracle Mop on QVC is Joy‘s centrepiece, in terms of where it occurs in the narrative and in terms of the quality of the film-making. Even here, the obviousness of the minor characters is a shortcoming. When Neil explains that the infomercial will be fronted by QVC’s top screen-seller, Todd (Bates Wilder), it’s immediately clear that he is a silly prima donna and that his attempts to sell the mop will be an abject failure. (This isn’t only predictable; it’s also incredible that someone as savvy as Neil Walker would expect otherwise.) Joy fights for a second chance to get her product advertised and to do it herself. The result is so good that it makes up for more than the Todd debacle: it makes sitting through the whole of Joy worthwhile. The chemistry between Cooper and Lawrence is strong; so is David O Russell’s orchestration of Neil Walker’s orchestration of Joy’s pitch. There’s a moment shortly before the QVC cameras roll that’s a perfect illustration of Jennifer Lawrence’s charm (and of Russell’s understanding of that charm). Joy appears, ready for the fray, in a glam dress. Neil admires her appearance. ‘I just want to change one thing,’ she says and closes the dressing-room door. Cut to the door re-opening and Joy emerging, back in the simple shirt and trousers she was wearing when she arrived at the studio.

3 January 2016