Russell's turd of a script makes Joy a poor but not unpleasant film

Rating: 5/10 (6 February 2016)

Forced to watch Joy in order to have a legitimate opinion on Oscar season, I really wanted to hate it. I can't even do that!
I love David O. Russell movies. The Fighter and American Hustle are both sensational movies and I even quite like Silver Linings Playbook for what it is. His direction of Joy is more of what I love about his films - warm and emotionally investing direction with memorable characters - even though I do believe its the worst one he's done in five years. He does a good job of conveying the highly stressful and emotionally draining lifestyle that Joy Mangano had to live with all of her incapable relatives on her hands. His use of the lively guitar strumming as background music for Joy's first sales pitch is inspired. But there's a lot of stuff I found utterly stupid even if it couldn't ruin the movie entirely. Characters are always kissing Jennifer Lawrence at random times - greetings, farewells, thanks - and it is almost like John Travolta was directing and saying "more face touching". A normal scene is playing out as Joy tries to find her lanyard and then one of her friends comes out with a line straight out of a Sean Maguire therapy session from Good Will Hunting. Russell has no idea how to balance his light moments with his heavy ones. The dream scene was one of the least subtle pieces of filmmaking I've ever seen, and for some utterly insane reason he decides to have her sing for about 10 seconds. My jaw dropped at the utter bizarreness of the whole thing.
The editing to this film is all over the place. A film should have one editor who clears things with the director. Joy apparently had many and you can tell. Scenes are inconsistently constructed, with a crowd of people vanishing as the camera changes perspective. At least three times a scene is dropped in the middle of another scene, breaking up the latter for no reason. Different takes are obviously edited together as people are standing in different places between takes, pieces of conversation are missing. Large portions of the film are messy.
I wanted to hate on Jennifer Lawrence because I think she's an incredibly overrated actress but she's probably the highlight of the film. Don't get me wrong, her nomination had nothing to do with her skill in this movie, she had nothing on competitors like Blythe Danner or Kiki Rodriguez. But she helps Russell convey the stress in Joy's life, and she shows anger and emotion when needed. Her whispered conversations with Bradley Cooper are the film's best moments. Her performance is far better in context that in the trailer - seeing important moments in the trailer is just painful to watch but in the flow of the film it comes close to working. By far her worst scene is when she has stage fright whilst selling her mop. There's no acting whatsoever, Lawrence is literally just waiting for the script to take her to the next thing she has to do. The biggest fault of the film is Russell's casting of Lawrence as a thirty- something mother of two. Not only is Lawrence 25, she's a young looking 25. She has baby cheeks and a sweet smile. Compared to Patricia Arquette from Boyhood or Sandra Bullock from The Blind Side, who have naturally maternal appearances, Lawrence is completely out of place. Even Brie Larson from Room put extra effort into her performance and had natural chemistry with young Tremblay. Lawrence and the actress playing her daughter are perfunctory at best.
The supporting cast is stuffed full of characters because David O. Russell wanted more "strong women" characters also undergoing character arcs. I don't know who they are, because they aren't in this film. Robert DeNiro barely tries as Joy's father Rudy (does he have bipolar, because he has enormous mood swings which I can't be certain are meant to be in the script). Isabella Rossellini overdoes it as Trudi, Rudy's new girlfriend, a character barely established before she starts bankrolling Joy. Diane Ladd narrates the film (apparently as an afterthought) and contributes nothing even when her character carks it halfway through. Elisabeth Rohm is straight up terrible as the fictional half-sister of Joy, whether she is droning her lines or unenthusiastically injected conflict into the film. Virginia Madsen might as well not even be there. Bradley Cooper is the only saving grace as the super calm and very reasonable businessman in charge of the QVC network.
It is ultimately David O. Russell's dreadful screenplay that causes Joy the most damage. It could not be more obvious that a white man was trying to write a feminist film here. At the start of the film a young Joy says "I don't need a prince", whilst throughout Joy glares down penis jokes and offers to help her. That's how Russell thinks women act and think. Worse are the scenes written for men to establish the patriarchy that Joy is fighting. Hearing DeNiro say "its my fault for encouraging her to be more than a housewife" gave me AIDS. Some scenes are so artificial and cliché that they are painful to watch - most notably any scene in which someone is selling the mop. Obstacles are created for Joy and then swiftly written over, creating the question as to why they existed in the first place. There's also the bizarre haircut = come into her own motif which makes no sense.
The film could have been a 3/5 for me if it weren't for the film's final scene. Joy's children are grown up, DeNiro now sports a snowy beard, Rosselini is almost unrecognisable...AND JOY STILL LOOKS LIKE JENNIFER LAWRENCE WITH A JODIE FOSTER HAIRCUT. Mark your calenders, everyone. David O. Russell predicts that 50 year old Jennifer Lawrence will look exactly the same as she does today.