TAT WOLFEN
DIRECTOR/CO-WRITER David O Russell has distinguished himself with noteworthy films over the years; think Three Kings, I (heart) Huckabees, Silver Linings Playbook. Joy is the astonishing and ultimately inspirational true story of Joy Mangano, the American woman who built a business dynasty on the back of her invention, the Miracle Mop.
From childhood, young Joy was always obsessed with making things. Her grandmother Mimi (played in the film by Diane Ladd) sees great things in Joy’s future.
As for her mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen), this apparently useless woman spends her life in bed, watching soap operas.
Joy’s dad Rudy (Robert De Niro) had divorced her mum and moved out of the house back when Joy was a kid. During her early adulthood, Joy’s still living in the family house (out of financial necessity) when her father ends up getting dumped back at his old home by his second wife, like some broken sewing machine. “You can have him back,” she tells Rudy’s ex, matter-of-factly. By that stage of proceedings, Joy has had a divorce of her own, and her hubby, with whom she gets along very well, lives rent-free in the basement.
Her dad, now back, but with second-class-citizen status, has to share digs with his son-in-law Tony – with whom he doesn’t see eye-toeye. So Joy’s left to manage the hostilities between her dad and mom, and dad and ex-hubby…
In the midst of all this dysfunction – and a dead-end job – Joy still finds the time to work on her ideas and inventions; in particular, her special mop that she knows will lighten the workload of housewives the world over.
I won’t kid you; this is an odd movie. The narrative doesn’t play out naturally, and there appear to be holes in the logic every now and then. It’s also sometimes difficult to ascertain the age of the central character, Joy. Quite often, the movie feels more like a stream-of-consciousness beat poem than a scripted film.
It is, however, one of the most compelling films I’ve seen in a while. If this were a book and I was writing a book review, I would have felt compelled to use the term “unputdownable”.
Much of the credit for the film’s