Movie Review: 'Joy'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- David O. Russell is on quite a roll.
In the last three years, he has directed three movies – The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle – each of which has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, each of which has earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, and which have combined for a glittering total of 25 Oscar nominations.
But it couldn't go on forever.
So it's no great shame – and certainly no indictment -- if his latest isn't quite up to the standards of its three predecessors.
It's called Joy, and it's an oddball dramedy, although not a Best Picture candidate.
But it still manages to showcase Jennifer Lawrence, who won the Best Actress Oscar for Russell's Silver Linings Playbook.
Sterling in her third collaboration with Russell and representing his first female protagonist, she could well be Oscar-nominated again, so strong is she in the lead.
J-Law is the reason to see this one.
Joy chronicles four decades in the life of Joy Mangano, whose life loosely inspired Russell's screenplay, which he wrote based on the story he co-wrote with Annie Mumolo, the actress who co-wrote Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig.
Mangano is a single mother of two in Long Island, with a thankless job working as a customer-service rep for an airline, who wills herself to become an entrepreneur and invents the self-wringing Miracle Mop, which she sells on the QVC network in the nineties.
Given that Joy's household contains several generations and her ex-husband, Joy certainly qualifies as a dysfunctional family comedy.
With Russell regulars Bradley Cooper as a QVC executive and Robert De Niro as Joy's father, as well as Virginia Madsen as Joy's mother, Diane Ladd as her grandmother, Isabella Rossellini as the new widow in Joy's dad's love life, and Edgar Ramirez as Joy's ex, Russell has plenty of talent and a spirited ensemble to work with.
But this Cinderella-like fable is Lawrence's show and she, playing an Italian-American character over a span of some forty years, is ferocious and brilliant, showing us Joy's struggle; the way she can be both romantic and cynical at the same time; her determination, perseverance, and need to succeed; and the dutiful sacrifices and compromises she makes along the way to the winner's circle.
This is a big role that demands steely, unshakeable presence – and Lawrence, even this early in her screen career, has got it.
Russell's movie is disappointingly scattered: it's a disorganized movie about organized chaos. But his empowered leading lady never lets go of us.
So we'll mop up 2½ stars out of 4 for a loose, quirky, inventive character study about an inventor, a mixed bag rustled up by David O. Russell. Thanks to another terrific turn by Jennifer Lawrence, Joy just might bring you some.
