Joy

 

Jen Larry in the poster for Joy.

Disappointingly, Joy isn’t a film about the old woman who lives next door to my parents.  I actually had no idea what the film was about, and it turns out it’s about mops.

That’s not a typo.  It’s actually about mops. And QVC. It’s sort of true.

Joy is, after Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, the third collaboration between director David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro.  In my opinion, it’s the least effective of the three.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Joy, a New York single mom with a supportive grandmother and a crazy mother who does nothing but watch daytime soaps.  Her ex husband lives in the basement, still attempting to be the next Tom Jones.  Her father, when kicked out by his latest partner, also comes to stay in the house.

When Joy invents a miracle mop and attempts to sell it locally, she fails, and gets into huge debt with her father’s latest partner (a nice turn from Isabella Rossellini, who has been absent from our screens too much lately). Inevitably, things improve and it all ends happily.

A nice flashback to a wedding aside, these early scenes are a little flat, and the film doesn’t get going until the introduction of Cooper as an executive at QVC. There’s an interesting bit of exposition that mentions Barry Diller, of interest if you’re into stuff about Hollywood from the 70s and 80s. Also amusing because he was an executive at Fox, which produced the movie. The film picks up as Joy and her mop is poised to become a huge success, but obviously things don’t go exactly to plan.

There’s a good cast, but the film felt very thin.  You really could excise a good thirty minutes at the start and not lose anything. It’s not a bad film, and given that it’s about a woman that invents something and it passes the Bechdel Test, so we should be supporting it, but it’s not a great film.  Like Truth, it’s a TV Movie with a great cast. A cargo cult film; all the right elements are there and it should be good, but it’s not.