Joy

Jennifer Lawrence in Joy

David O. Russell's Joy strikes me as one of the more underappreciated films of the past year. Not up to par with his best films (Flirting With Disaster, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle), but, like I 💛Huckabees and Three Kings, it is a rewarding, if minor, work. Joy is a feminist fairy tale that alternately critiques and celebrates capitalism (like ...Huckabees) by portraying the life of the title character, the inventor of the Miracle Mop. Jennifer Lawrence is as likeable a presence as always, but doesn't convey enough New York attitude. Russell's hold on his supporting cast is similarly variable. Isabella Rossellini's performance has a more comic tone than that of her onscreen amour, Robert De Niro, for example.

The messy and ambivalent tone of Joy probably didn't help it with critics or audiences, but it is consistent with Russell's polyphonic intent. This is a story told with a variety of voices. Joy's Grandma (Diane Lane) narrates the opening of the film as a female empowerment fable. However, Russell stays with this device only fitfully when he wants to stress Joy's resourcefulness. Russell spends time illustrating the soap operas Joy's Mom (an unrecognizable and brave Virginia Madsen) is addicted to. I don't know if it was snobbery that elicited raspberries to this subplot, but I enjoyed watching Susan Lucci, Maurice Bernard, and other soap stars keep a straight face as they burlesque the already rococo conventions of the genre.

Russell wants to stress the illusory nature of television and how it affects consumers as they gaze upon capitalism's lustrous baubles in the comfort(?) of their own homes. This he magnifies in the QVC sequences which resemble a heightened dreamscape more akin to the mise en scene of a soap opera or music video than the homey realism of the scenes in De Niro's garage. Russell does this because he wants to hold up material wealth as a poisoned chalice. The struggle for wealth ultimately alienates Joy from family and friends. Bradley Cooper's QVC producer warns her that this will happen early on, but it is Joy's acknowledgement of this at the end that marks a mature acceptance of her fate. Her hair is up, teased and styled. She has donned the modern armor of the business suit. Previously, when Joy chopped off her hair, she was asserting her individuality while straining against gender (and genre) confines. She was becoming a business warrior. Eventually, she accommodates herself to the corporate business structure and wears its uniform. She acknowledges the producer's wisdom as a gesture of a onetime comrade, now adversary, who like her does battle in the maw of Darwinian capitalism. 

The ending of Joy is not a particularly happy one. On an economic scale, Joy is a success. She lives in a great mansion with family and hangers on, many of whom are trying to sponge off or swindle her. She has a few loyal friends, but there is no Lawrence/Cooper dance to the altar this time round. I think this film was made more to expand Russell's palette than to please a mass audience. It is an extension of the polyphony of American Hustle and its focus on illusion. People do not meet in Russell's films, they and their agendas collide. 

Russell is one of our best directors because of the quality of his writing, his utility with actors, and his handling of visual space. Adam McKay, in The Big Short, cannot visually express the threadbare nature of the hedge fund firms he wants to depict. Russell frames Joy, hoping to get her foot in the door of a media behemoth, at the very corner of a frame dominated by an ugly blue wall. She is dwarfed by corporate culture, but unbowed. Russell foregrounds too many themes early on and has too much variety of tone for coherence in Joy, but a pulse is discernable. (6/25/16)