Joy is the latest David O. Russell film to pair Jennifer Lawrence with Bradley Cooper, and there’s a touch of the old classic Hollywood in this ongoing screen partnership. Which is appropriate, as the film taps into the vein of equally classic women’s pictures and gives it a loving shot in the arm. If melodrama had evolved properly with the times, today it would look like Joy.
Based on the true story of ‘Queen of QVC’ Joy Mangano, the film first meets Joy as a child in love with creating, designing, making anything. While supported from youth by her grandmother, the film’s narrator Mimi (Diane Ladd), Joy finds her yearnings kept in check by her bedridden mother Terri (Virginia Madsen). Hailing from a different era, Terri is a nipped bud of a woman content to spend her life staring through the most ostentatious spectacles since Iris Apfel at TV soap operas – not coincidentally the modern day home of melodrama.
Cut to adult Joy (Lawrence), a poor, divorced mother whose ex-husband is living in the basement. Terri clearly won the battle between her and Mimi for Joy’s future and still lives with her, still bedridden – voluntarily, it seems. Joy’s father Rudy (Robert De Niro) returns to roost after his latest break-up, worsening an already volatile situation. Wealthy widow Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) enters the fray as his new girlfriend. All the while Joy’s passive aggressive half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm) snipes from the side-lines. The entire family bickers and relies on Joy, though perhaps impinge is a better term. While her family harangue her they’re draining her strength, running down her life’s clock. Then she conceives a million dollar invention.
The film's glorious mess of toxic relationships, judgemental family and despair at its lead’s own wasted potential are all hallmarks of the aforementioned women’s pictures, the forties and fifties melodramas epitomised in the films of Douglas Sirk. In those films, the best the tragic female leads could hope for would be to fight their respective oppressors through the socially forbidden love of unconventional men; here Joy breaks free from under her vampiric family’s weight through nous, resilience and moral fibre.
It’s the simple rise, stumble, dusting down and starting again that happens all the time in the movies, yes, but that doesn’t make it boring. It happens all the time in real life too, especially all the time in commerce (incidentally, impossible to tire of Rossellini saying that). As a society we love underdog stories and we love sentimentalism and in cinema we love the crushing sting of defeat too. Joy’s a pretty steady balance of all three, hinting at moral complexities regarding family and loyalty without sparing time for them proper; we’re peddling hope here dammit!
Those classic melodramas which presented a woman striking out in business like Joy typically ended by punishing their lead with ruin, prison or death. In the case of iconic melo-noir Mildred Pierce, with which Joy shares more than a passing resemblance, it’s all three. This approach is jettisoned here, as Russell’s film charts a heroic feminist tale with a lowercase f. It centres a fascinatingly multifaceted character and resists politicising its not insignificant gendering. Most importantly, it rejects that fatalistic streak which marked its predecessors with grim realism. The resultant Joy is just that – straightforward but addictive, the way all optimistic wish fulfilment is.
Joy is currently on general release and will be showing at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 14 January 2015.
Joy Trailer
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