Joy is my kind of legal drama. No, it’s not about criminal acts in a Criminal Minds or Law & Order sort of way. Nobody’s killed, and nobody appears in court during the movie. But there’s patents, contracts, and even an indemnity clause, oh my! And the climax invokes fraud, which is both a civil action and a crime. Not to sound like a prick, but ah, I can’t help it: I can’t help but wonder how much the legal issues in Joy go over people’s heads, which doesn’t allow them to fully enjoy the movie. Because Joy is a really good movie.
For movie buffs who are aware that this is the third movie featuring Director David O. Russell teaming up with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook may be their only frame of reference. I don’t think it was marketed correctly, and I don’t think that audiences know what to expect of it because of that fact. This trio’s previous work together may have also set up an unfair and irrelevant comparison. I’m reviewing Joy solely on its own merits.
Damn, that’s a lot of prologue. OK wait, just a litle bit more.
Joy is a fictitious story inspired by the life and success of entrepreneur turned business magnate Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop and countless other home products. Joy is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who earned herself a “Best Actress” Oscar nomination for her role in the movie. It’s the story of Joy’s rise from a suffocating family and poverty to finally breaking through every shitty road block that’s put in her way, including from her own family.
There. That’s better.
Joy is a slow burn that gets increasingly better as the film goes on. It starts off in her dysfunctional 1970s household, where she lives with not only her grandmother and 2 kids, but she also allows her divorced parents and her ex-husband to live in her house, leeching off her energy and her generosity. Her mother sits in bed watching soap operas all day. Her dad, played by Robert DeNiro, can’t get along with anybody. He continues to live with Joy even though he owns his own auto shop and has recently started dating a wealthy Italian widow.
Joy herself is a creator. People who are creators have an innate drive to create things, which Joy has done since she was a child. She even invented a dog collar that would have put everyone in a better position if her mother had actually helped get the collar patented and marketed. But like a grown-up 1970s Cinderella story, Joy’s creativity and spirit are crushed by the absurd amount of responsibility that rests on her shoulders, from caring for her children to paying the bills to addressing every single gripe in her family, right down to doing her own plumbing.
Out of this miserable existence, her experience with disgusting and dangerous wringing leads her to create the Miracle Mop that has a built-in wringer and a detachable mop head for throwing in the washing machine. Sick of having her creativity stifled, Joy takes on a gauntlet of obstacles every step of the way to getting her mop made and marketed. She has to acquire financing from her dad’s new lady friend. There’s someone in Hong Kong who ostensibly holds a patent on a similar mop, and a shady manufacturer who supposedly works with the person in Hong Kong. And even after getting her mop on QVC, she faces one debilitating business hit after another from the shady manufacturer. Despite the fact that her dad owns his own business, her half-sister helps run it, and her dad’s girlfriend tries to care for her late husbands fortune, there’s not a lick of business sense among any of them and they effectively help the manufacturer drive Joy to file for bankruptcy.
As the business hits and shady dealings kept coming, I sat dumbfounded at how her family continued to blame her for bad business decisions. Not only because of her family’s own bad business sense, but because her family knew the attorney they initially consulted had given bad advice worthy of malpractice, and because for everything the shady manufacturer was doing that didn’t seem fair, there were ways to go about going after the manufacturer and obtain some remedies for Joy. So what she does in the end to take things into her own hands, study up, and then stick it to the guy pulling the strings against her without even needing to go to court was highly satisfying (it’s actually not the gun).
There’s a lot to like about this movie. Even though I spotted a toy from 2013, I really liked the 1970s feel. Joy’s dysfunctional family is hilarious and zany. Bradley Cooper is a great fit for the guy who runs QVC television production, and he’s at once likable and sleazy. The story is solid, as I already detailed. And Jennifer Lawrence really carries the movie. I don’t know what it is, but she seems to be a perfect fit to play down on their luck women with a strong drive to succeed. She really deserves that “Best Actress” nomination.
Joy is a very good movie. It’s just missing a little something else to make it great. The scenes showing what’s going on in the soap opera and then showing Joy dreaming of being in the soap opera were a little too clever by half and not executed with enough sincerity, so it came off as a little too tongue-in-cheek and clunky. It also feels like you’re being beaten over the head with symbolism when Joy not only reads to her kid aloud about cicadas who hibernate for 17 years, but her younger self late appears in a dream to spell out that symbolism. The Soundtrack also could have used better tracks to help drive the feeling of the movie. It’s just little nitpicky things that kept the movie from being as good as it could be. Still, I’m really I glad I saw this movie.
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