Here's an odd thing about David O Russell's oddball period piece: the film's poster and trailer rely heavily on the very last shot of the film. This strategy seems to defy all current orthodoxies about the deadly "spoiler". Yet you can see how this might have happened. It is only in the closing five minutes that Joy seems to discover its purpose.
Some grandiose opening sentiments about celebrating female determination noted, Russell's mad film comes across like a buzzy, energetic work in progress. This is not to suggest this somewhat over- praised director is in decline. Joy is a more authentic than the ersatz, fetishised American Hustle (a film about lapels). It is less sentimental than the compromised Silver Linings Playbook. I look forward to seeing Joy when it finally decides what it wants to be.
It shouldn't need to be said that Jennifer Lawrence, Russell's muse and life force, plays the energetic, constantly harassed title character. Joy Mangano, the real-life Long Island typhoon who created the Miracle Mop, appears to have sprung heroically from the lyrics of Peggy Lee's I'm a Woman.
Joy lives among yet another of Russell's colourfully barmy families. (See also the Solitano clan in Silver Linings Playbook and the Ward dynasty in The Fighter.) Her mother (Virginia Madsen) spends the day lying in bed watching lunatic soap operas. Rudy (Robert De Niro), her intermittently estranged father, has just taken up with a deluded Italian heiress (Isabella Rossellini), named, with melodious synchronicity, Trudy.
Each of these stars wrestles his or her character with murderous enthusiasm; none manages to make anything more rounded than a comic caricature.
Most of the people who aren’t Joy exist only to get in the way of the person who is Joy. They offer terrible financial advice. They put her in contact with shady business partners. The two notable exceptions are her sweet ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez) and her loyal best pal (Dascha Polanco). Joy’s challenge is to break free.
It takes a while, but we eventually encounter a classic “eureka” moment when Joy fails to successfully clean up a broken wine glass. She runs home and sketches out the design for a super-absorbent mop that can ring itself out.
The film encounters another potential formative moment when Joy finesses her way onto an early incarnation of the QVC shopping channel. A film about this weird, disturbing phenomenon would be a thing indeed. Bradley Cooper, playing the largely benign head of the operation, explains some of the channel’s deathly secrets, but the story moves swiftly on before we get a chance to properly engage.
We will pass over the stunt casting of Melissa Rivers (a steady, undemonstrative person) as her mother Joan (who was Joan Rivers) with as little hurtful comment as possible.
Lawrence is, of course, tremendous throughout. Playing a woman with scarcely enough time to breathe, she is driven to a more internalised performance than her extravagant turns in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. The innovation seems to come easily to Joy. She must, however, force herself to learn the arts of hustle and brag. Russell's film is, among so other half-formed things, an essay on the survival instinct.
We eventually end up with a degree of neatness. That journey finds the film casting off its early cynicism and embracing unconvincing myths of the American Dream. Work hard and you too can become a morally balanced billionaire. Work harder and you can (it seems) become the most absurdly generous participant in a real-life version of Dragon's Den.
I’m not convinced.
