Largely the editor's fault

Rating: 2/10 (16 May 2016)

Like "Aloha", there's a point where you wonder if this was edited by either a trainee or maybe release 2.0 of movie editing A.I. Joy Mangano's life story probably lends itself to theatrical treatment but you can't tell that from this bewildering hodge-podge of vignettes. Most of the script revolves around showing how Joy's life is something of a self-inflicted misery of needy beings incapable of taking care of themselves - children, lounge singer ex- husband, father played by the once interesting Robert Deniro and mother played by the once interesting Virginia Madsen - dragging her down. Each of these miseries is then contrasted with her name. Get it? Hopefully you do because the contrast between her personal and financial misadventures and her happiness denoting name is used as a knowing wink to the audience about fourteen times. Largely the trainwrecks continue until a trip to Dallas where everything somehow turns itself around for indiscernible and un-foreshadowed reasons. In short, there's probably a biography or just Joy's Wikipedia page you could read instead.