JOY: Dull Dolls

Director: David O. Russell
Writers: David O. Russell, Annie Mumolo
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini, Dascha Polanco, Elisabeth Rohm
Runtime: 124 mins.
2015

I've heard time and time again that early career David O. Russell is better. My favorite of his has been The Fighter, the earliest of the four movies I have seen. I enjoyed the film, a boxing movie with a weird quirky spin. The dialogue was off kilter and the side characters were kooky; I still remember being thrown off kilter by the way the movie framed the weird cabal of sisters. It had a great original energy to it. Silver Linings Playbook maintained that energy, but situated it in a widely accessible package. The edges of psychological illness, that movie's subject matter, are smoothed over in a palatable and appealing way. Next was American Hustle, to which I gave a primarily positive review back in the day, but even then my major problem with the film was the lackluster convenience of the ending. It felt like Russell spent the whole movie setting up dominoes, then calmly placed them back in the box without ever knocking them over.

Now we've arrived at Joy, the culmination of a trend that has been brewing in Russell's work for years. After the critics and the public alike fell for Silver Linings Playbook, Russell has been catering to those crowds. These films aren't passion projects. They are what he thinks people want to see. This is a baseless claim of course, but I bring it up as an illustration for my feelings about Joy as a whole: it is a movie utterly devoid of passion.

I'll immediately except Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper from that claim. Lawrence seems about as invested in the material as she was in Mockingjay - Part 2 (which isn't much compared to her usual stellar work), but does a good job carrying this film as she knows she must. Cooper doesn't have a major role, but he does create the only scene in the film I really liked--a backstage glimpse of the QVC shopping network, in which Cooper prances around as the sales roll in, encouraging the cameramen to focus on the saleswomen's hands.

Joy is a "biocomedy" (so the pre-movie commercials informed me) about Joy Mangano, a woman with a terrible family who one day decides she is going to invent something and become rich. That something is a mop. She shops the mop around and stops at the newly pioneered QVC home television shopping network. The mop flops, but Joy ends up on top.

Not a single thing about this film feels motivated. It contains all of David O. Russell's signature quirks: emotionally abusive family, bizarre side characters, willful but directionless protagonist, pop music needle drops, roving camera, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, etc. etc. Yet this time around, it's all empty. Every gesture is perfunctory, every strange development a chore. It feels as if David O. Russell is just going through the motions. Maybe when he discovered that the people prefer Silver Linings Playbook to his earlier more challenging work, he resigned himself to playing in the same sandbox for the rest of his career. That is what this movie resembles more than anything: a boy, sitting in a sandbox, playing with the dolls that he has owned for years, on the verge of boredom, but lacking the energy to find something else to do.

The way all that manifests in the movie is inconsistency and lack of consequence. The pop music needle drops fumble through the narrative for the first twenty minutes or so, then disappear. The quirky family drama dominates the narrative for half the film, then is abandoned for an entirely different film about business procedures and the pursuit of success. Robert De Niro is, yet again, a pain in the ass old man who speaks his mind no matter what anyone else thinks, but nothing good or bad ever comes from it. People engage in hurtful argument, then mere seconds later become complacent and disinterested merely because the script requires it. Every moment of the first half of this film is supposed to be piling weight on Joy's shoulders, but none of it feels real. There is one moment of character change in the entire film--maybe two--and that initial moment comes as the direct result of a dream. Cause and effect do not reign in the world of Joy: here everything feels inevitable, the easiest pitfall of a biopic.

I was so disengaged from the family drama that there came a point in the movie when Joy receives a phone call that is obviously disastrous news, and I found myself hoping for the death of a family member above a problem with the business. The supposed emotional underpinning of the whole affair was so alienating that I considered every single one of the supporting characters to be 100% expendable.

Everything in Joy is easy, and thus everything is boring. The movie begins and ends with a family member delivering banal voiceover that sets up the desired emotional payoff of the film in a lazy, baldfaced way. This voiceover also casually and unthinkingly posits the existence of life after death for no apparent reason. The voiceover talks about time as if it will be important to the story, but it just becomes one of the countless aborted themes dangling at the end. Characters spout lines that make no effort to disguise the naked emotional manipulation. "This is my fault, I should have never encouraged Joy to be more than she is--a simple housewife," De Niro distractedly mumbles at a climactic moment. "But Mommy," Joy's daughter says in the sweetest of voices, just as Joy is about to give up on her dream, "I though Grandma said you were destined to be the matriarch that would lead our family to success." These characters aren't speaking from their heart, or even from their mind. Their words are the verbal embodiment of plot prerequisites.

Then there's the issue that has gotten more widespread attention, that of the characters being significantly aged down and prettied up. It's a problem that babyfaced Jennifer Lawrence is playing a haggard middle aged mother of two, but frankly I just see this as another symptom of Russell's lack of engagement. Why put effort into an interesting cast when he already has these old dolls lying around in the sandbox?

During the runtime of this movie I could only muster up blankness and mild irritation as a response. What is the point of it all? That sometimes someone decides that they are going to make a lot of money, and then they do? You can reduce all plots to idiot summaries like that, but Russell's approach to this film is begging for it. I don't know what he has next on the docket, but if it stars Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro, and if it looks as appealing and awards buzzy as his last three films, I am sure that I won't be able to drum up any interest.

2 / 5  BLOBS