Joy is a semi-biographical dramedy following the life of Joy Mangano, a woman who overcomes her dysfunctional family life as well as the difficulties of building a business from nothing, to invent the Wonder Mop in the 1990's.
The film starts off as a surprisingly funny one considering the potentially dry material. Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is struggling to run a household which includes her bed-ridden mother, Terri (Virgina Madsen), her grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), her two children, and her ex-husband Anthony (Édgar Ramírez), who lives in their basement. Things become even more complicated when her father Rudy (Robert DeNiro) is dumped on her doorstep by his current partner, claiming she can no longer deal with him. It would be easy to evoke empathy with a set-up like this but O. Russell gleefully paints this family with vivid strokes of outlandish humour, like Terri and her soap operas, or Rudy's inability to not be in love, that instead garner a greater sense of empathy through the familiarity of family. There are however, some more questionable writing choices, like that of having Joy's grandmother occasionally narrate the story, or it's odd use of flashbacks throughout different stages of the film.
Regardless of all this the film does have a plot though and eventually, after moping up glass on her fathers' new girlfriend Trudys' (Isabella Rossellini) boat, Joy is inspired, just as she was as a child, to invent a self-wringing mop. From here she must convince Rudy and Trudy to help her invest in her product after showing them a prototype so that she can manufacture them, but even after placing a second mortgage on her home she is unable to sell her product, when Anthony introduces her to Neil Walker (an underused Bradley Cooper), executive of the recently started cable network shopping channel QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience).
For me personally the film peaks at the end of the second act when Joy successfully markets the Miracle Mop on the QVC network after it had previously failed on the first attempt. By this point she has overcome an appropriate amount of obstacles to make this victory well-earned and inspiring. The writers, however, seem to disagree and the third act begins with the tonally jarring death of her grandmother, Mimi, and from there Joy's problems seem to unnecessarily multiply as once again the validity of her success and dreams are put into question. Her dysfunctional, yet previously endearing, family lose any semblance of kindness as her half-sister Peggy (an unrecognisable Elisabeth Rohm) makes a blunderous business decision behind her back, while her father and his girlfriend are revealed to have given her bad advice about her invention patent at the beginning of the film, and the father of her children stands idly by as all this happens and Joy is forced to declare bankruptcy. The scenes are potentially the most emotionally charged of the film, and Lawrence and DeNiro are given the best material to work with here, but to what end? After a western-esque standoff with a troublesome business partner in which Joy successful solves all her problems the end of the film shows Joy as the head of a multimillion dollar advertising agency in which she helps inventors like herself produce their products for television. It is a very odd ending. She's still taking care of her heartless family, a problem, it turns out, she was never to overcome. And while she's helping those like herself, she no longer comes across as herself, sitting at a big desk, dressed in a fancy suit (something she made a point about not doing before unveiling her Miracle Mop on QVC), no longer in touch with the woman that needed and made that mop. And that's not even mentioning that flashback to her time as girl is which she pronounced she didn't need a prince but seemed to be longing for one now.
Undoubtedly inspiring and surprisingly funny, although tonally problematic, Joy maintains itself to be an enjoyable enough film.
Rating: 3/5
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