Inventor Mangano on the Jennifer Lawrence-Led Biopic ‘Joy’

WERTHEIMER: Mr. Russell’s newest movie is called “Joy” with Jennifer Lawrence in the title role.

Lawrence talks about the difficulties of becoming an actress and how determination got her where she is. So seeing her in this very real, very transforming role, I give her props. It all began with the Miracle Mop, which was the invention that launched a multi-million dollar enterprise, and that is the story of Joy.

Jennifer Lawrence with Robert De Niro, who plays her father Rudy, and Edgar Ramirez.

One day Joy awakes with a vision of an innovation in mop technology. If you can come through that and still have some connection to your joy you felt when you were a child that’s a very mature kind of a joy that I find inspiring. Even though the road to success is loaded with landmines, Joy never stops her journey, even when she is challenged by the manufacturing process and getting her device on a shopping network. She will need some financial help from Trudy though, and her father includes her annoying half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm) in the venture because he believes she has “ideas”. It all comes with a cost however, and the ripple effect caused by Joy’s success threatens to tear apart the fabric of family she spent her life holding together. Joy’s mother Terry (Virginia Madsen) is in an upstairs bedroom, where she mostly watches soap operas and tries to ignore life.

Joy Mangano (Lawrence) is a doer, and her grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd) sees a great deal of potential in her to become the matriarch of the family.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t get almost the cast support she should.

Only in the penultimate sequence, during which the downtrodden dreamer finally stands up for herself, does the film show any appreciable sign of life.

Joy is now screening. This is real stuff because depending on where you are in your life, the tone and objective of the movie will resonate with you.

“Joy had been buried for 17 years”, Lawrence says about Joy’s eventual emergence. She’s doing what she does to make a better life for her family, and it’s through the pure motivation that she is able to succeed in ways her on-screen counterparts cannot. The problems arise in the editing, which forces the story to feel far more disconnected than necessary, especially in the sluggish first act.

The performances are a bit aimless.

This assumption is evidenced by the film’s marketing, including a trailer which gives little away about the film outside of a series of jump cuts culminating with Jennifer Lawrence firing a shotgun.

JOY is gratifying because it’s engaging, and because it’s a kind of story that we don’t usually get, at least in a version this well-told – it’s about a woman consumed the with desire to do something useful in the world who insists on fairness from that world, and it’s playful instead of ponderous.

With handsome cinematography and powerful performances, Joy should have been a guaranteed awards contender, but sloppy editing and muddy storytelling makes for a decidedly underwhelming feature. Such sleight of hand fits con story American Hustle more snugly, and there’s a sense that Russell is here straining to find his film – four editors are credited.

However, if it’s that or seeing “Star Wars” again, or watching Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant” drag his bear-torn carcass across the tundra for two-and-three-quarter hours, well…

If you’ve read any other reviews of Joy, or checked its rating on sources like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, you may notice that this review stands out from the general consensus. Rather, it’s just another likeable Russell-Lawrence knockabout.