Screened Out – Joy

[three-star-rating]Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro, Virginia Madsen, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rosselini, Edgar Ramirez[/three-star-rating]

The mop is made of plastic; the film often feels like it, too.

I admit I adore flicks where a person overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds – The Color Purple, The Shawshank Redemption, Erin Brokovich and even WALL-E. Joy should’ve been another true-to-life version, and another strong feminist flick to boot (which I also love). Too much artifice and sarcasm cheapens everything.

It’s still a very good film, solidly entertaining, specifically because of Lawrence’s wonderful work. Joy could’ve been great, though, and instead a mess even a super-mop cannot clean up.

Joy Mangano (Lawrence) was a struggling divorcee and mother in the early 1990s. Her Long Island home played host to her ex-husband (Ramirez), her grandmother (Ladd), and often her divorced mother and father (Madsen and DeNiro). She barely supported all of them and her two children by working two demeaning jobs. Still, the house – on the verge of foreclosure – was falling apart, both literally and figuratively. She couldn’t keep it clean; she couldn’t keep it solvent.

It’s a far way to fall for this valedictorian whose grandmother always believed would change the world.

Absolutely everyone else in her life discouraged Joy. Her mother was a shut-in addicted to soaps. Her father was an angry man-child. Her husband bemoaned being a down-on-his luck lounge singer. Her sister a bucket of cold water.

Still, Joy used her daughter’s crayons to draw a mop that would wring itself, one with a super-absorbent head you could throw into the washing machine. Through derring-do – and despite some serious setbacks – Joy started personally selling thousands upon thousand of these mops on QVC.

Great story, right? The actors are amazing, too; director/writer David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) uses this same cast a lot.

So, if you have all the pieces for a radiant re-invention, what does it take to make it actually work? Russell turns in an enjoyable film. Unfortunately, some serious gaffes – too much exposition, too much flat comedy, too many tangents, and odd narration – robs this flick of some of its, well…joy.

First of all, Russell cannot decide if he’s filming a gritty, realistic Erin Brokovich story or a goofy Wes Anderson comedy full of broad, two-dimensional characters. (A bad sign is that the film had four editors.) Joy starts off with 40 full minutes of exposition – though funny, it’s aimless. The comparison of Joy’s life to soap opera makes this true story seem trite, as if Russell is actually mocking Mangano. The narrating grandmother is just plain hokey.

[rating-key]

All of these choices make this biopic feel plastic and cheap. There’s just not much cleanup even great actors like DeNiro, Rossilini, Cooper, Madsen, and Ladd can do with characters Russell’s script seems to deride and degrade.

The amazing thing is that Lawrence’s performance raises Joy from its own mess. Her portrayal is radiant, with that subtext of craziness and dogged self-determination. It feels like no obstacle – not even Russell’s sloppy storytelling – can stain this actress’s talent.