David O. Russell’s Joy has a tagline that promises the moon: “In America, the ordinary needs the extraordinary every single day.” The film that follows rarely earns it. Joy runs 124 minutes and stars Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano, a Long Island single mother who built a business empire. It is a drama, and it is based on a real life. It is also, too often, a slog.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano
Lawrence is the reason to watch. As Joy, she carries the film’s weight, and the performance won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical. That win is deserved. She plays a woman who is tired, sharp and still moving, and she does it without asking for pity.
The film’s awards run did not stop there. Lawrence was nominated for the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Actress and for the Academy Award for Best Actress. That fourth Oscar nomination made her the youngest person in history to reach that count. Joy itself was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy.
A House Full of People and No Room
The film opens in 1990. Joy is an airline booking agent in Peconic, New York, and she is broke. Her house is a crowd. Her two children live there. So does her mother Terri, who spends the day in bed watching soap operas. So does Mimi. So does Tony, her under-employed ex-husband, who sleeps in the basement and wants to be a singer.
Then Rudy moves into the basement too, after his third divorce. Peggy, Joy’s overachieving half-sister, humiliates her in front of her children over the failed marriage. It is a lot of setup, and Joy spends a long time on it.
Mimi and Jackie push Joy toward her inventing ambitions. The push pays off. Frustrated with a conventional mop, she designs a self-wringing version. Trudy agrees to invest.
The Mop and the Hong Kong Royalty
The business turns complicated fast. Joy and Trudy contract a California company to make the mop’s parts cheaply. The company advises Joy to pay $50,000 in royalties to a man in Hong Kong who holds a similar product, to avoid a potential patent lawsuit. The source does not say whether that payment was ever made, and it does not say how any patent dispute ended.
Then the manufacturer keeps billing Joy to remake its own faulty parts. She refuses to pay. This is the film’s best stretch: a woman who has bet her house on a product, fighting a company over parts it made wrong.
Joy meets Neil Walker, who agrees to sell her mops on QVC. To make 50,000 more units, she takes out a second home mortgage. The first TV attempt flops when the celebrity pitchman demonstrates the product wrong. Joy demands a second infomercial. She does it herself. The mop sells out and earns thousands of dollars.
“In America, the ordinary needs the extraordinary every single day.”
What the Movie Does With Its Own Story
The success does not hold. Mimi dies suddenly. Then Peggy pays the manufacturer’s excessive overcharges without Joy’s approval, and the business is in financial jeopardy. The manufacturer refuses to refund the money, and a contract loophole lets them keep it. Joy has to climb out again.
Here is the problem. The film has all the parts of a great story and keeps losing the thread. The pacing drags. The writing leans on family chaos when it should lean on the fight. Russell wrote the script with Annie Mumolo, and the two never decide what the movie is: a business procedural, a family drama, or a star vehicle.
It ends up as the third. That is not a disaster. Lawrence is enough to hold a viewer for 124 minutes, and the QVC sequence is the one place the film finds a pulse.
The Supporting Cast Does What It Can
De Niro is fine as Rudy, though the role is mostly noise. Cooper is smooth and brief as Walker, and the film could use more of him. Ladd gives Mimi the only warmth in the house. Rossellini’s Trudy is a plot device more than a person.
Madsen’s Terri is the film’s strangest choice. A woman in bed watching soap operas for two hours is a metaphor, not a character, and Joy never gives her a scene that makes the metaphor pay.
The supporting cast list is long, and that is part of the trouble:
- Robert De Niro as Rudy
- Bradley Cooper as Neil Walker
- Edgar Ramírez as Tony
- Diane Ladd as Mimi
- Virginia Madsen as Terri
- Isabella Rossellini as Trudy
- Dascha Polanco as Jackie
Every one of them is a real actor. Most of them are given one note to play.
The QVC Sequence
The QVC stretch is the film’s one clean win. Neil Walker agrees to sell the mops on television, and Joy has to bet a second mortgage on 50,000 units to fill the order. The first attempt fails because the celebrity pitchman handles the mop wrong. Joy demands to do the infomercial herself, and the mop sells out.
That sequence works because it is the only part of Joy where the stakes are concrete and the clock is real. Everything around it is family noise.
Where the Film Lands
Joy grossed $101.1 million worldwide after its December 25, 2015 release by 20th Century Fox. It received mixed reviews, with praise for Lawrence and criticism for the writing and pacing. That split is the correct read.
The film wants to be about a woman who invented her way out of a crowded house. It keeps cutting away from the invention. The mop is the point. The mop is barely in the third act.
What matters here is Lawrence. She makes Joy a person instead of a symbol, and she does it in a movie that does not always return the favor. The Oscar nomination was not a fluke. The film around her was.
The detail worth keeping is the $50,000 royalty payment to a man in Hong Kong. That is the moment Joy understands its own subject: a woman paying a stranger for the right to make something she thought of herself. The film never returns to that idea with the force it deserves.
Joy is a 5.6 of 10.
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