Review of Joy (2015) by Pablotee — 25 Dec 2015

Joy-- it is not. In the kitchen, having the best ingredients available to you does not ensure the success-- if the recipe you are working with is bad to begin with. That is true also with Joy. It is blessed with a star studded cast of actors who probably should have run away from this turkey at first sniff, but wait, David O. Russell has had a string of successes, so what the hey!

Russell usually has been able to make his films work by moving the story along at a fast enough clip that the viewer doesn't have time enough to dwell on how cliché and contrived some of his characters and situations are. That is not the case with Joy. In fact, there are a number of scenes in this movie where the characters are caught in almost Wes Andersen sort of trance-- they have that deer in the headlights look. The difference is that this is not a Wes Anderson movie and the writing and direction is not good enough to make you want to suspend belief. You never really believe in the characters because you never really get to know and care about them enough. Isn't that what any good film should always have at its core??

Joy throws a lot of star power around with actors like Robert DeNiro, Bradley Cooper, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rosselini playing the supporting cast, but they are pretty much wasted and only serve to divert our attention away from Jennifer Lawrence's character, instead of helping to illuminate it. You end up simply not caring about her or the others. All the clichés are exposed for what they are. Perhaps this is because the original script by Annie Mumulo was reworked by Russell and certain key biographical elements of the real Joy Mangano were taken out? Who knows? What is clear in the end is that this film loses a viewer’s attention one-third of the way through and never gets it back.