Joy

Release Date: December 25th, 2015
Running Time: 124 minutes
Written & Directed by: David O. Russell (Story by David O. Russell & Annie Mumolo)
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini, Édgar Ramírez, Virginia Madsen, Diane Ladd

Joy is the third movie written and directed by David O. Russell to star Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro, following the instant classic Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and the solid American Hustle (2013). The trio of films play as spiritual counterparts to one another in that they're not connected by plot or character but rather by a tone that comfortably balances comedy and drama. Silver Linings explores social dysfunction and mental illness with a good-natured sense of humour, compassion, and romance. American Hustle portrays goofy characterizations of 1970s con artists donning gaudy fashions of the day, but layers of power and relationships in the confidence game are examined in interesting ways. And Joy, the weakest of the three, nonetheless delivers within a limited framework as a clichéd rags-to-riches success story—a thoroughly Hollywood-ized, fairy-tale fantasy. It's loosely based on the real life of Joy Mangano, a divorced mother who became the head of a multimillion-dollar business empire after inventing the "Miracle Mop" in the 1990s.

The story starts in the late 1980s, establishing Joy's (Lawrence) dissatisfied life as an airline booking agent struggling to make ends meet. She's the de facto matriarch to her offbeat family who she shares a house with in Long Island, New York. Her ex-husband Tony (Édgar Ramírez), a small-time lounge singer, lives in the basement where he practises crooning in the style of his idol Tom Jones. Joy's mother Terri (Virginia Madsen) and father Rudy (De Niro) are divorced, but Rudy moves in after breaking up with his girlfriend. Joy can't refuse him since he helps pay her mortgage with money from his autoshop business, but having no rooms left she sticks him in the basement with Tony whom he regards a deadbeat. Terri is reclusive, spending her days in bed watching a soap opera. Joy's small son and daughter don't do much except provide the occasional "cute kid" line, and her elder sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm), the one family member who doesn't live in the house, is alternately affectionate and condescending towards her. Joy's grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), perhaps the least eccentric of the bunch, provides voiceover narration. But it's unnecessary and feels contrived to give the film more of a fairy tale feel by having an old woman tell the story. Grandma isn't even in the film much except as Joy's most supportive family member, while the others fluctuate between nurturing and belittling. But it would've been better to have Joy narrate it herself, since it is her story.

The first third of the film shows the family dynamic as they are all simultaneously encouraging yet burdensome to Joy, punctuated by scenes of the soap opera that Terri watches and Joy periodically enters through recurring dream sequences. This adds to the fantasy feel, as well as flashbacks into Joy's childhood, underlined by a score of magical, dreamy music. It all makes for a cutesy, sentimental crowd-pleaser. We expect that everything will work out for Joy, so the outcome is somewhat predictable, especially for those who know the true story of Joy Mangano. Nonetheless, the actors are all solid here, and the script good enough that it still compels us to want to know exactly how Joy will succeed.

Joy has no flaws; she's young, beautiful, smart, and tenacious. Her problems stem mainly from a string of bad luck and a few questionable decisions. But those decisions were motivated by family loyalty; she bypassed her dreams of being an inventor so that she could help her parents through their divorce. While it's Joy's family that has held her back, they also all rally behind her and chip in to help develop her new mop invention. So, Joy has all the makings of a classic underdog, caught in a series of circumstances beyond her control. We want her to succeed because she's just like most North Americans, and to see her achieve her dreams would be a fulfillment of justice in an otherwise unjust universe. Shouldn't she be rewarded for the years of sacrifice supporting her family, and for her working class values? The way the story unfolds and plays on the sensibilities of average working folks is deftly executed. And the fact that her breakout invention is a mop is all the more fitting in this regard; a tool of janitors and ordinary moms the world over.

After a few hurdles in bringing her mop to market, Joy's big break comes when she manages to get Neil Walker (played with "I believe in ethical business" earnestness by Bradley Cooper), the president of a home shopping network, to let her pitch the product on TV. Despite Joy's lack of experience as an inventor or product spokesperson, the mop sells out immediately. Everything seems roses for a moment. She's made it. But then a rapid turn of events shows the shadiness of capitalism putting Joy's enterprise in jeopardy, as she's threatened by would-be patent thiefs, competitors, and crooked manufacturers. Business is a dirty, well, business. While I have no doubt that the world of commerce is full of crooks, thieves, and liars as bad as, and much worse than the film depicts, it's kind of unbelievable here as they're portrayed as one-dimensional street thugs. 

It's also revealed that Joy is massively in debt, but this isn't explained in any satisfactory way. Earlier it's shown that she owes thousands to her product investor Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), her father's wealthy new girlfriend, but by this point Joy has already sold upwards of 200,000 mops, so why is she still so deeply in debt? The mop has presumably made Walker's company a lot of money, so where are his corporate lawyers coming to her defense? It all makes for a feeling that there's more to the story than is shown here. Maybe the average movie-goer doesn't care, but the soundness of a story is in its details. Joy's financial turmoil escalates and everything comes crumbling down in the formulaic "all is lost" part of the script. But we know it's not over. Thanks to Joy's intelligence and determination she turns the tables on the people who tried to wrong her, and it's all nicely resolved. Despite these narrative shortcomings, what emerges through this part of the story is one of its strong points; a feminist triumph over sexism in the business world, as Joy refuses to give up and overcomes gender and class obstacles.

At the same time though, when viewed through a larger political lens, this story plays as an endorsement of the clichéd American Dream fable, the pro-capitalism charade that says anyone can "make it" within the system. Maybe anyone can, theoretically, but realistically, few do. For every one Joy there are a million people who remain unknown—poor, nameless saps whose dreams are never realized. Most people don't transcend their race, colour, gender, class, or other barriers of oppression. The odds are stacked against them. Joy is an exception, and not an example of the majority. This is the truth about the corporate capitalist system; the American Dream is a fallacy that in fact does not benefit most, but rather very few.

In this way the movie presents a double-edged sword; on one hand it intends to inspire with its rare example of the against-all-odds success story—but on the other hand it neglects to address any broader significant impact that telling such a story has, and ignores its political implications in this hyper-industrial age that we live in.

Neil Walker says, "In America, the ordinary meets the extraordinary every single day." This is the film's thesis, that old American Dream story that anyone can achieve anything if they just buckle down and put their minds to it. Because America is the greatest country in the world. Because capitalism is a great system. Because...freedom. The inextricable link between oppression and liberation, wherein conditions of disenfranchisement birth opportunity for change, has long been a big part of American ethos; a textured fabric of cultural forces comprising a spectrum with heightened extremes of despair and hope, demoralization and empowerment. It's a paradoxical paradigm in which the pursuit of personal financial success renders one complicit in reinforcing the very same system that results in increased marginalization for so many. The way out, we're told, is to get rich. But it's an exhausted notion that continues to be disproven in reality, as we now live in a time of rising social unrest and immense class and race divisions. And climate change, a direct result of such a system, threatens the existence of everything on the planet. By telling stories like Joy more often than stories of significant political change, Hollywood continues to extend the American establishment's aim of keeping everyone believing the false notion that equal opportunity for all is possible within such a system so that we'll continue to perpetuate it.

The film makes no mention of the oil industry that provides Joy's plastic mop handles, and ignores the politics of "stuff"—dangerous avoidances in this age of advanced corporate domination, climate change, socioeconomic divisions, widespread poverty, immoral labour practices, sweatshops, overproduction, and dollar store crap, etc. To its credit, an important issue that Joy does somewhat address is class. But it's used against the audience to further the film's political undertones; we're told that if you're poor, working class in America, you can have it all just like Joy. It's a propagandistic promotion of the pursuit of material wealth.

I don't know if Joy's products are made with ethical labour standards or environmentally-sustainable methods, if she knows or cares about such things, or how much profit is possible on a mass production scale while considering such things. If so, then that'd be an impressive tale, of transforming the business world through conscientious, progressive practises. But instead we have this story of one person getting rich by selling consumers nifty devices that marginally improve their lives, like the Miracle Mop or Joy Mangano's other best seller—velvet, non-slip coat hangers. There's an implication that Joy's products improve the world by offering longer-lasting, higher-quality items that dampen the market for competing disposable products, but this point isn't emphasized and the question remains—does the world really need more stuff? Despite its questionable subtext, Joy still manages to tell a fairly compelling story within the limited perspective of its Hollywood, American, capitalist ideals. This is perhaps its biggest accomplishment—it makes us believe that Joy's success is something that we should all admire and aspire to.
Rating (out of 5): ★★★
• Nik Dobrinsky / Boy Drinks Ink
April 26th, 2016