The pleasures of “Joy” are purely personal and performance based.
The story and style? Not so much. Director David O. Russell again assembles his ensemble of Avengers, spearheaded by Jennifer Lawrence and another eccentric supporting performance by Robert DeNiro.
While it is fun to watch these two bicker with each other and everyone around them, the volume of the squabbles, the fragmented storytelling style and the whiplash pace create a tonally disorienting, unconvincing and often incoherent experience.
Its high-pitched, dysfunctional family interactions are the opposite of Wes Anderson’s impish and idiosyncratic family in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Lawrence plays the real life title character, a divorced woman with two kids struggling to survive and living in domestic dissonance with: her mother, played by Virginia Madsen; her father DeNiro; and a supportive ex husband played Edgar Martinez.
Madsen is house bound, agoraphobic, obsessed with soap operas and real life daytime and prime time soap stars like Susan Lucci and Donna Mills, appear in blunt vignettes.
If Joy doesn’t get her life together, she will end up like her mother. She was a precocious child whose imagination and ambition was encouraged by a loving grandmother played by Dianne Ladd.
That part of her brain lay dormant for years. Until she applies her inventiveness to creating a new kind of floor mop. She builds a prototype, finds an investor in DeNiro’s girlfriend Isabella Rossellini, has them manufactured and convinces a slick TV producer, played by Bradley Cooper, to let her sell them on QVC.
Happy ending? Not quite. Family squabbles continue and she finds herself in litigious and dangerous situations while securing her copyright.
Russell’s “American Hustle” was the best movie Martin Scorsese never made and his wall to wall pop soundtrack here – Bee Gees, Nat King Cole, the Rolling Stones – evokes Scorsese again in ways to suggest energy and momentum. But the material it covers is scattered. While “Hustle” was a sprawling tableaux, and “Silver Linings” a relationship story, “Joy” is part family movie and promotional industrial video.
Comedy was one way tell it but maybe not the best. It may be true but its lessons are neither inspirational nor aspirational as intended, presumably. Although Lawrence has zeal and can do spirit to spare.
With “Hustle” and “Silver Linings” Russell turned Lawrence into an Oscar-winning movie star and gave Oscar winner DeNiro regular work. “Joy,” however, suggests they may have played out their string.
**1/2 Two and one half
With Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Edgar Martinez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini. Produced by John Davis, Megan Ellison, Jonathan Gordon, Ken Mok, David O. Russell. Written and directed by David O. Russell. Approximate running time: 124 minutes. Rated PG-13; language.
Tags: David O. Russel, Jennifer Lawrence Robert DeNiro, Joy Posted by