Aubrey Malone
Joy (12A)
A few short years ago, Jennifer Lawrence was just another ‘wannabe’. Today, she’s one of Hollywood’s most high-profile (and sought-after) stars. How has she essayed such a seismic shift so suddenly, going from jobbing actress to prestigious A-lister?
She isn’t quite sure herself. “It’s a bit like a job promotion,” she says. “You may not be able to explain it but neither can you turn it down.”
Perhaps her most refreshing quality – apart from a thoroughly naturalistic style of acting – is her endearing sense of fun. This was apparent on a New Year’s Eve appearance on The Graham Norton Show where she was promoting her new movie, Joy. It’s something she shares in common with that other great sport – and beauty – Cameron Diaz.
Lawrence is also refreshingly clumsy, as she demonstrated at the Oscar ceremonies a few years ago when she managed the unique feat of tripping “up” a staircase. Was this her way of demythologising the event?
She’s also a bit of a rebel in her way but in Joy she perhaps misappropriates that rebelliousness as the film veers uneasily between feminism and farce in its scattergun approach. It chronicles the building-up of a business dynasty by Joy Mangano (Lawrence), a woman who “invents” the self-wringing mop and then sets herself the task of selling it to the world in the face of apparently insurmountable obstacles –and a chaotic home life.
After the bruising intensity of the recent Suffragette, the idea of a divorced, working-class mother-of-two trying to escape the dysfunctionality of a 1980s family (and a man’s world) by trying to mainline this domestic innovation has to strike one as, at best, somewhat jarring, despite Lawrence’s best efforts to make it into a tale of resilience and true grit.
In her attempt to deal with a dead marriage and two dysfunctional parents – Robert de Niro is her downbeat dad and Virginia Madsen her TV-addicted mom – she fights her way to the top of the corporate world with the aid of kindly television executive Bradley Cooper, but the film sits uneasily between works like Erin Brockovich and Baby Boom in its zeitgeist.
It has its moments, but every time it draws us into its web as a bona fide tract about an indomitable young lady fighting a slew of vested interests it seems to haul itself back into a kind of Capraesque fairy-tale with its wacky set-pieces. This leads one to feel that its overall vision either wasn’t fully thought through or derailed along the way by its eccentric asides – and its eccentric cast.
This is disappointing as director David O. Russell, who’s worked many times with Lawrence and Cooper before (and indeed de Niro) is usually more consistent in his aspirations.
Whatever fragile chemistry the film enjoys is down to the almost clairvoyant understanding these three stars seem to have with one another.
By now they must be almost able to finish one another’s sentences. But here, unfortunately, they seem like fugitives from three different movies.