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.
