JOY. About the Woman Who Invented the Miracle Mop

As the saying goes, if something is made for everything, it’s good for nothing – a similar rule applies when you try to throw several concepts into one basket and end up fully realizing none of them. David O. Russell clearly wasn’t quite sure how he wanted to make Joy.

He considered making a comedy – but abandoned that idea entirely after the first part of the film. He thought about a biography, after all, the screenplay was based on the life story of Joy Mangano, but he gave up on that vision too. He created his heroine by combining elements from the biographies of several inspiring women, ultimately doing justice to none of them. At times, it seems like he was enamored with the style of his colleague Wes Anderson, but he doesn’t match him in consistency or charm.

Elements of a musical appear here and there, as does a nesting-doll-style narrative structure. Grotesque scenes go hand-in-hand with drama, and a loose approach to time and space clashes with the classical linear narration from off-screen. There are nightmares, prophetic visions, a soap opera – in short, a complete mess and a mishmash of everything that was likely meant to showcase the director’s originality and fresh concept, but ultimately proves only his indecision.

As a little girl, Joy was a volcano of ideas. She was always designing, building, and inventing, arousing jealousy in her half-sister and admiration from her ever-supportive grandmother. Yet somehow, something went wrong, and a dozen or so years later, Joy is still far from life success. She has two young children, is divorced from her husband (who still lives with her), takes care of her father, grandmother, and a mother lost in her own world, and on top of all that, she has to endure constant jabs from her spiteful sister. She does feel a sense of unfulfillment, but tries to push it to the back of her subconscious.

That is, until a random series of events awakens her inventor’s instinct once again. Joy designs something that could potentially be a lifesaver for thousands of housewives around the world: a self-wringing mop, today known to us as the Miracle Mop. The road to success is anything but smooth and easy. Joy faces dishonest contractors, a greedy family, the weak character of those closest to her, and a crisis of faith in herself. Before she can move forward, she’ll have to learn how to stop defining herself by the expectations and opinions of those around her and start speaking with her own voice.

The real Joy Mangano is now the holder of over a hundred patents and the head of Ingenious Designs, a company that supports the innovation of ordinary individuals burdened by their circumstances – just like she once was. The cinematic Joy also finds success, of course, but the inspiring value of the uplifting story of a woman who didn’t give up, took her fate into her own hands, and overcame obstacles along the way gets lost amid a flood of details, side plots, and characters of little significance.

The brightest point of the entire film is undoubtedly Jennifer Lawrence. She alone seems like a real, flesh-and-blood person in the midst of all the chaos. She’s likable, and you want to root for her. Everyone else is exaggerated to the extreme – which can sometimes be pleasant, like in the case of Virginia Madsen, and sometimes less so – like the witchy Isabella Rossellini. The characters played by Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, meanwhile, lack vitality and consistency.

Both the film and Jennifer Lawrence would likely have benefited if the director had held back from unrestrained experimentation and done more justice to the facts by making a truly biographical film. The plot’s flimsy pretext strips the message of all the power it undoubtedly has – or at least should have had.

Sure, it’s understandable that a filmmaker might shy away from telling yet another rags-to-riches story – after all, we’ve seen thousands of them. Still, trying too hard to be excessively original is an overcorrection in the opposite direction. One must know moderation, and to maintain it, it helps to know what one wants to convey and, artistically speaking, who one really is. In the case of Joy, David O. Russell lacked both.