By Peter Malone, ACBC
Joy is a rather generic name for a film. We might expect experiences of joy and, by contrast, of sadness. But Joy is the name of the central character, based on an actual person, Joy Mangano.
Audience expectation is high with Jennifer Lawrence in the central role. She had worked with director David Russell on The Silver Linings Playbook and won an Oscar for best actress, as well as in an Oscar-nominated role on American Hustle. Here, she is the central character and works again with Bradley Cooper as she did in previous Russell films as well in period drama, Serena.
In fact, Joy begins with sequences from a black and white, very stolidly photographed and performed soap opera. The audience needs to keep this in mind because Russell is very serious with his American dream drama, with its touches of nightmares, contrasting with the soap operas. Indeed, the soap opera continues throughout the film with later developments in colour and using more sophisticated filmmaking, constantly watched by Joy’s mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen), a recluse after her divorce, living in her room and dependent on her television program.
We see Joy as a child with her half-sister, Peggy, friends with a touch of rivalry. Their father, Rudi, who owns a repair business, is played by Robert De Niro. Flashbacks show Joy, married, divorced and a mother of two, working for an airline, a mortgage on her house, living with her grandmother and reclusive mother and not many prospects. As she meets with her best friend, Marie (Dascha Polanco), we view Joy going to a bar, meeting singer, Tony (Edgar Ramirez), then bonding, marriage, years going past, two children, his not getting a satisfactory job and living in the basement but still good friends with Joy. Then her father wants somewhere to live and is put in the basement where he fights continually with Tony.
Rudi then makes an online dating connection with widow Trudi (Isabella Rossellini) and they hit it off. On a yacht cruise where they are forbidden to drink red wine which could stain the teak woodwork, they do spill it and Joy mops up, cutting her hand, which then gets her thinking about a mop that could be squeezed by an inner mechanism.
Trudi gives a loan to make the mop but, when Joy tries to demonstrate it outside KMart, she is arrested. The local parish priest gathers a number of Hispanic women who need work and they combine to become the company which makes the mops.
Tony has a connection with a producer at a television shopping channel, Neil (Bradley Cooper). By insistence and force of personality, Joy demonstrates the mop for Neil and persuades him to let her advertise her product. The American dream becomes a nightmare when the salesman spoils the whole demonstration – with Joy then determined to do it herself and subsequent sales rocketing.
That would be too good to be true. As has been said, the American dream has nightmares and there are all kinds of clashes, especially with Peggy who wants to control things with the support of her father, and issues of bankruptcy, especially with Trudi, confrontation of the factory owners in California, the discovery of fraud from Texas – and Joy, studying the documentation, confronting the enemy, succeeding and her dreams then come true.
Whether they were put off by such a study of mops, a number of commentators decided the film was rather trivial and silly but it seems they underestimated Jennifer Lawrence’s screen presence and performance, the strength of the supporting cast, and the value of the American dream for someone who might have been a very ordinary and under-achieving American housewife.
Rated M (Infrequent coarse language).
Fr Peter Malone MSC is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.