Joy: Making Miracles Happen

Writer-director David O. Russell is back with his repertory cast of Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, and Bradley Cooper to tell the story of Joy, based on the real-life inventor of the Miracle Mop, Joy Mangano. Like most Hollywood enterprises that are "based on true events," this is a fairly loose reinterpretation of history, and the script by Russell and Annie Mumolo is sometimes entertaining and sometimes just plain weird.

Lawrence plays Joy, a frustrated airline booking clerk dealing with divorced parents (Virginia Madsen and Robert DeNiro) who serve as the dictionary definition of "eccentric," two young children, a wonderfully supportive ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) who lives in her basement, an unsupportive sister (Elisabeth Rohm), and Mimi (Diane Ladd), her arthritic grandmother who is her only champion. The movie is narrated by Mimi, so you hear a lot about how Joy is wonderful, while the rest of the people in her life are all dragging her down.

As a young girl, Joy always loved to invent things, a talent that was quickly quashed by society and her circumstances. Now she is struggling to make ends meet through her dead-end job and has reached the end of her rope. One day, she comes up with the idea of a self-wringing mop, an idea that quickly develops into the Miracle Mop. What follows is a tale of how the mop gets made, the favors she has to call in, the people who dupe her along the way,and her ingenuity and determination through every setback. She heads to the newly-created QVC channel to shill for her product and becomes an unlikely home shopping star, setting records and surpassing all expectations of the channel's leading executive, Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper). It's all very inspiring and rah-rah, and by the end, there's a relatively happy ending.

Joy is an OK movie with a great leading performance. Lawrence is doing the best she can with the material she has been given and there's no question she serves as the glue that holds the varied bits of this movie together. The film has the strangest tone, unsure if it's a comedy, drama, biopic, or fantasy fairytale. It wanders into unexpected places, gets very surreal, then anchors itself back in fact before setting off into uncharted territory again. Isabella Rosselini adds a particular sense of absurdity to the proceedings, showing up out of nowhere to first serve as Joy's fairy godmother and then turn into the evil stepmother. I suppose I should be grateful that the movie features many women with varied relationships with each other, but ultimately, it falls flat because it doesn't know whether to take anything seriously. It has the right parts but they weren't mixed in the right quantities. The result is a movie that could have been great but instead is merely mediocre.