The film opens with a dedication: “Inspired by the true stories of daring women. One in particular.” That one in particular is clearly Joy Mangano, the inventor, entrepreneur, and Home Shopping Network mainstay, even though her last name is never mentioned in the film. Interestingly, very little is actually known about Mangano’s life prior to her emergence in 1990 with the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing mop she invented that catapulted her from struggling single mom to millionaire entrepreneur, so it is anyone’s guess as to how much of Russell’s script (which was a complete rewrite of a script originally submitted by Bridesmaids scribe Annie Mumolo, who retains a story credit) is true to her life and how much is complete fiction. It gives the film both an air of mystery and an ironclad protection against complaints about how facts were fudged or characters created wholesale since virtually no one outside of Mangano’s family and friends really knows.

Lawrence stars as the titular Joy, who we are first introduced to as an inventive, determined child with great promise. Unfortunately, that promise goes largely unfulfilled as she is forced to drop out of college to help her parents when they divorce. Her father, Rudy (Robert De Niro), owns an auto repair shop and is both brashly outspoken and prone to fits of anger (although he remains lovable in that grumpy-De Niro kind of way), while her mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen), is an owl-bespectacled recluse who spends all day in her bedroom watching soap operas. Joy was married for a few years to Tony (Édgar Ramírez), a failed singer, who still lives in her basement even though they’ve been divorced for two years. She and Tony had two children together, which means that Joy is essentially managing a small house with two small children, an emotionally stunted recluse of a mother, and her ex-husband. Early in the film Rudy comes to live with her as well, which adds more stress and antagonism to the already comically strained family. The only person with any sense of stability besides Joy is her grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), who narrates the film in a manner that gives Joy’s story the aura of a fairy tale.

While the film’s early passages deal primarily with Joy’s extended family and the various conflicts among its members (which include flashbacks to Joy and Tony’s wedding, which Rudy pretty much ruins with a disastrously honest toast), the second half of the film focuses on Joy’s attempts to break out of her financial struggles and reinvent herself as an inventor and entrepreneur with her self-wringing mop. Such an enterprise, of course, requires a great deal of capital, which she borrows from Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), Rudy’s new girlfriend who is sitting on a great deal of money from her deceased husband. After designing the mop, Joy has to hire a firm in California to make molds and actually produce it, after which she has to find distribution and sales. Through Tony she meets Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), the executive in charge of the newly formed QVC, a home-shopping channel that offers Joy the chance to reach a wide audience. Everything is stacked against Joy, and her initial efforts meet with failure after failure, but we can rest assured that her doggedness will eventually pay off, even though things get much, much worse before they get better.

Like Silver Linings Playbook, Joy offers up interpersonal dysfunction and mental instability as quirky humor, and Russell’s cast runs with it, creating an offbeat rhythm that keeps the film clicking. Unlike the manic character she played in that film, Lawrence is essentially playing the straight-woman here, the rock against which all her family members are constantly banging, which understandably takes its toll. Her slow journey toward personal success and true self-actualization is similarly bogged down by people trying to ride the coattails of her efforts, including her half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm). At the same time, she is also helped more than once by those who are her true friends, which include her childhood best friend Jackie (Dascha Polanco) and Tony, who turns out to be a much better friend than he was a husband.

However, while the tendrils of the first half of the film certainly snake their way through the second half, it starts to feel like a different movie altogether once Joy begins in earnest to remake herself as an inventor. There is an extensive subplot in the film’s final third that involves shady businessmen and financial leeches trying to steal her idea and profit from it, which invokes all manner of little people-against-the-big-bad-system mythos and all its attendant emotional undercurrents. Few actresses are better are conveying determination than Lawrence, and she gives it her all, transforming from a frustrated young woman just barely keeping her head above water to a powerful entrepreneur whose hard work and refusal to give up pay big dividends. The film’s most gratifying element comes near the end when Joy uses her wealth and influence not just as means of furthering her own ambitions, but to help others, because she remembers what is was like to struggle and go unheard. In that regard, Joy finds a new level of uplift, not just in its protagonist’s success, but in how that success can be used graciously for the benefit of those who are standing where she once stood and looking upward.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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