Jennifer Lawrence is always a ‘Joy’ to watch

Critics found Joy, the true story about Joy Mangano, who invented the Miracle Mop, to be cliché and over-the-top.

So you can say it’s a sort of biopic, or you can call it a complete biopic.

Mr. Russell has specialized in crazed families from the start, with “Spanking the Monkey” and “Flirting With Disaster”, among other films; more recently Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Cooper were front and center in the most dazzling of his screwball sagas, “Silver Linings Playbook”.

The revelation in 2014 that the next film from Russell, whose last three films garnered him a combined five Academy Award nominations for writing and directing, would be about a mop, of all things, raised a few eyebrows at first.

Jennifer Lawrence plays a mop mogul in a film that never quite fulfills its promise. Fox will undoubtedly hope for citations in Best Picture, Best Director (for Russell), Best Actress (for Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (for Cooper, De Niro, and/or Ramirez), Best Supporting Actress (for Ladd, Madsen, and/or Rossellini), Best Original Screenplay (for Mumolo and Russell), Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing.

Joy’s father, Rudy (Robert DeNiro), operator of an auto fix shop and an Archie Bunker-ish racist, is once again on the romance market, his latest marriage having gone belly up.

Joy is never boring, but its meandering nature leaves us feeling curiously unmoved. You’d think she were returning a pet beagle who couldn’t stop chewing everyone’s slippers.

“It brings out the best in Russell and Lawrence to show Joy fighting to retain her humor and humanity in a world of crass commercialism”.

Bradley Cooper plays the QVC executive who backs her, then becomes her business adversary.

Joy’s daughter is in the house, too. With the moral support of her grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), Joy is the glue that binds all of these dysfunctional creatures together, and she’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, every moment of every day.

Later that night, she has trouble sleeping, so her family forces a couple of belts of expired children’s cough medicine on her. She awakes with a vision that would become the Miracle Mop. She does need her friend Jackie, though.

Sometimes these days we’re quick to reject the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality, but David O. Russell seems to be challenging us to see a deeper contemporary value in this. It’s been done before, although not by Easy Rider, which is about freedom, or In America, which is about family. The fact that Joy’s mop joins Luke Skywalker and Spider-Man as conspicuously absent from its own theatrical preview is telling. When a prospective funder asks her if she would be willing to pick up a (possibly metaphorical) gun to protect her invention, she says she would. She went out of her way to introduce herself and mingle.

The movie is off to the races.

AP: What do you most want people to take away from the film?

AP: So now you’re making a new version of the Miracle Mop? Their latest collaboration looks like it was going to be the same beautifully crafted tale of quirky characters engaged in interesting activities.

So he puts them both on the air. But it’s a role that principally requires stamina and pluck – more Katniss Everdeen than her daffy Playbook and Hustle characters.

This is, by turns, affecting, funny, off-the-wall and downright irresistible. “So I keep interrupting this (other) director and I feel bad”.