No Drama + No Comedy - Stakes = Zero Story

Rating: 2/10 (22 December 2015)

Mostly, the everyman applauds when another everyman struggles against odds to find success. Sometime those struggles are herculean. Not the case in "Joy." While the real life, inventive Joy deserves kudos, the bottom line is this is a feature film about the creator of a better mop.
Russell struggles, unsuccessfully, to portray as harrowing the path to the mop. Joy (Jennifer Lawrence), deals with a houseful of kids, only a few of them children by age. The motley crew in a small house is not on Joy's side. She is the breadwinner, the adult, the rock whose imagination is a liability to those overly dependent on her. It's a paint-by-numbers affair from there – familial jealousy, dirty financial dealings, the nightmare foretold by the old saw, "Do not do business with your family."
The only one with an eye on Joy's genius is Grandma (Diane Ladd). Joy uses her small crumb of encouragement to build a mop prototype. She brings it to QVC where the initial sale segment bombs. Slick QVC huckster Bradley Cooper takes a chance and allows Joy to showcase the mop herself. Bingo! The mop sells out. Success? Nope. The parts supplier is screwing Joy, every sale of the mop loses money, and the family wants their money back. Financial ruin follows. Then Grandma dies. But the plucky Joy womans up to settle all scores financial and emotional. Hoorah!
In lieu of dramatizing a woman overcoming, Russell instead created a painfully unfunny comedy. His palette is broad with a spectrum of quirkies mincing about with a family dynamic that could only exist in a poorly written movie like "Joy." The spot-on Russell eventually had to fall. "Joy" is the X marking the spot.
Made-for-this-film, unfunny soap opera segments are unmotivated. There is no subtext pointing to the off-TV characters. There's also no payoff. There are out-of-left-field scenes of the soap in the first quarter and it's never seen again. What's the point?
The Cooper-Lawrence chemistry bright and vibrant in past screen pairings is absent in "Joy." Here, it's given way to forced discomfort. There's a sense Lawrence, Cooper and DeNiro at some point knew "Joy" was a dog and tried hard to not phone it in. That or their direction was, "You've just been hit by a phaser on stun."
The tonally confused "Joy" offers little on the path to an unsatisfying end where Joy makes it big, big, big and helps others succeed.
There's little sympathy for Joy. The stakes: not living to one's potential and living with unfulfilled dreams. Her children are healthy. Her dad, DeNiro, runs a going concern and could help financially if push came to shove. She's smart and capable of working. Poor Joy.
One wonders about the scores of courageous men and women who daily struggle against far greater odds, wolves at the door, to put bread on the table. Where are tales of these folks? It's an odd and tragic choice for Russell to highlight Joy's story (and insensitive in the current economy where one in seven US children go to bed hungry). The can-do attitude of a person overcoming trials is powerful. Open your eyes, Mr. Russell. There are far better underdog tales to make. They're just not sexy as Lawrence dancing with a mop.