Movie Review: "Joy" (David O. Russell, 2015)

CAUTION, WET FLOOR by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Ms. Lawrence stars in her third Russell movie.  Photo ©20^TH Century Fox

The Joy in David O. Russell’s “Joy” is Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop.  She’s played by Jennifer Lawrence, who Mr. Russell often casts as a shrieking, hyperactive temptress (see “American Hustle” and “Silver Linings Playbook”).  Yet in “Joy,” Ms. Lawrence is oddly dour.  In an early scene, someone tosses an airplane ticket in her face; she barely blinks.  Apparently, Katniss forgot to bring her bow.

            In Mr. Russell’s movie (which was loosely adapted from Ms. Mangano’s life), Joy’s quest to invent a “self-wringing mop” is no easy feat.  She has to manufacture the mops in father’s grungy auto shop (true to Ms. Russell’s penchant for spurts of violence, the shop stands next to a scraggly gun range) and persuade a business slicker named Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) to swing his corporate might in her direction (like Ms. Lawrence, Mr. Cooper seems to be operating on sleeping pills; when he meets Joy, he stares blankly at her from across a gray office table while delivering a belittling, dead-sounding monologue). 

            Eventually, Joy faces Neil’s ad cameras to sell the Miracle Mop to the masses.  And as Ms. Lawrence smoothly strides across a stage, pointing emphatically and insisting that the world hungers for her invention, the film acquires a zesty rhythm (“You’ll never need another mop,” Joy declares early in one scene).  Yet “Joy” also prays on its heroine’s slipups, from her misplaced trust in her family to the money she bleeds as she ascends like a phoenix of finance.  Her losses stab at the balloon-like buoyancy that the movie strives for, transforming the project into a sudsy downer.

            What “Joy” could have used was a cameo by Rosalind, Ms. Lawrence’s character from “American Hustle.”  Rosalind, after all, was the woman who partially incinerated an oven, kissed Amy Adams, and rocked a pair of lemon-yellow dish-washing gloves like they were medieval gauntlets.  Imagine if she had been in “Joy.”  She wouldn’t have just mopped it up; she would have wrung it out.