Here’s a story that Hollywood has been waiting for: the rags-to-riches saga of Joy Mangano, the entrepreneur and inventor who gave the world… (fanfare of 80s-style synthesiser trumpets) the self-wringing Miracle Mop. Whether the best director to tell that story is the erratic David O Russell is another matter. His last film, retro-styled crime caper American Hustle, was so exuberantly cynical that you can’t quite believe he’s playing with a straight deck in telling the tale of a hard-working woman realising her destiny on the QVC shopping channel.
Executed with much the same quasi-Scorsese whiz-bang as Hustle, though the material rarely seems to call for it, Joy works most convincingly as a vehicle for the no-nonsense warrior-woman persona of Jennifer Lawrence, who comes across personably if a touch coldly. Joy revisits the dysfunctional family milieu of Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, the parallels underlined by the casting: Bradley Cooper is a TV exec, Robert De Niro returns as a cantankerous patriarch. But visually, and narratively, the film feels cluttered – too many people hover with too little to do, notably Virginia Madsen as Joy’s TV-addicted mother.
Written by Russell, with a co-credit for Annie Mumulo (Bridesmaids), Joy is bafflingly uneven in tone. With its mix of goofy one-liners, can-do cliche and greetings card piety, it’s hard to determine whether Joy is satirising TV shopping’s paper-thin glitz, or out to redeem the medium as genuinely glamorous, even a secular fount of hope.
There’s some agreeable company, though: not least Isabella Rossellini, who has never been as gleefully cartoonish. You won’t be bored – but Russell never convinces you that this mop-maker’s story is worth getting in a lather about.
