JOY is the wild story of a family across four generations centered on the girl who becomes the woman who founds a business dynasty and becomes a matriarch in her own right.
The occasional use of dream sequences and flashbacks, particularly to Joy's courtship and marriage, are jarring. But Russell draws out expert performances from the ensemble.
Joy is far from Joyful; with an uninteresting narrative, performances that feel drained of passion and a filmmaker caught between his roots and his new-found mainstream sensibility, it is an utter mess.
Russell is almost totally uninterested in the story of how Joy Mangano explored a bizarre and unknown new business model and became its first self-made tycoon, and as a result we aren't interested either.
Perhaps people who make gazillions selling housewares on The Shopping Channel deserve to be honoured; if they do, Joy is not a fitting tribute to Mangano - nor to the mop.
A briskly entertaining film about a woman who "makes it" as an entrepreneur, even if the film fosters Horatio Alger type illusions in a period of deep capitalist decline.
The movie's a shambles, alternatingly agreeable and aggravating, held together by our interest in its heroine and by Lawrence's tremendously sympathetic performance.