Kritiken

A fairy tale of lean-in capitalism about a Cinderella without a prince, Joy recasts the crazy family of a Capra comedy with stellar toxicity. Joy's (Jennifer Lawrence's) undermining relatives are the selfish American clan par excellence, claiming to know everything about Joy's business while undermining her future. Robert De Niro and Isabella Rossellini, playing evil-universe versions of themselves as Joy's father and stepmother, delight in their performances as fickle scoffers.

[After walking out 30 minutes in the first time,] I went to see Joy again two weeks later. And while I did not become less put off by the conceit of the film, I began to feel, oddly enough, that Joy shared in my consternation. Joy is a film about the pursuit of wealth and opportunity that isn't quite sure if the story it tells should be told anymore. For our crisis-ridden times, it seeks to be — impossibly enough — both an exacting mirror and an escapist dream.

That's about as intriguing as Joy the movie gets before turning into a film-length advertisement for the self-empowerment of its working-class protagonist... Fortunately, Lawrence could mop the floor and it'd be interesting (which, in fact, she does). Her energy and genuineness, and ability to surprise by modulating happy and sad emotions despite her outward glow, are all impressive. But it's still not enough to save the film, which bumps along to an abrupt, broken-backed ending.

The director's first film with a female central protagonist, Joy is effervescent and has a familiar paciness but this time he hasn't elicited Lawrence's daffy sexiness.

The salespeople are artists, the circular set is a miracle – and meanwhile Cooper name-drops Hollywood moguls like Jack Warner and "son of immigrants" David O. Selznick, finding razzle-dazzle in the peddling of cheap junk to bored housewives. This is probably the grand, all-American satire Russell set out to make – but instead he made Joy, a smaller film about repression and frustration. All in all, I'd say it turned out okay.

Russell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren have found a perfect harmony in their sensibilities, capturing Joy's rocky path with warmth and emotional vibrancy. Joy is a film about life's defiance of expectations. It defies them right back.

For better and for worse, Joy is an auteurist detour par excellence. It compares mop manufacturing to industrial filmmaking, and allegorically defends self-expression as the route to self-actualization by showing Jennifer Lawrence deliver ecstatic monologues about three hundred feet of continuous cotton loop.

Rather than finding Russell idling around the same aesthetic cul-de-sac again, Joy is (mostly) a surprisingly straightforward, three-act rise-fall-rise drama that, after an enjoyably all-over-the-place start, becomes increasingly streamlined and focused.

Joy is for the most part a bewildering mess—possibly because its four editors are a sign of structural problems, possibly just because Russell throws too much directorial dash at us when he should be making things simple... Lawrence's opacity lends a certain chilly reserve and ambivalence to a film that's otherwise often outrageously clunky and on the nose, especially in the musical choices: Sinatra's "The Good Life" for a yacht ride, Cream's "I Feel Free" for the triumphant finale? Really?

Joy" demands that the audience become emotionally invested in a mop. It's ridiculous. "Joy" doesn't work entirely, and the structure set up so clearly in the opening sequence is dropped early on for no apparent reason, but I'll be damned if I didn't get carried away at the story of a mop sweeping the nation. It's a lunatic "Mildred Pierce," without the murder.

There's a cultural void in Joy, nothing but soap operas and snippets of pop music to nourish the imagination. Its underlying story is that of Russell himself, of the self-liberation from a cultural wasteland, the virtues of education, and the assimilation of classical ideas and ideals that ultimately make the difference between a mop and a movie—between the vast practical and emotional intelligence that Joy brings to her work and the unfolding of her activity in a story that moves and inspires.

The film's turbulence might be meant to reflect the messiness of Life Itself, but the result is as phony as the stains meticulously daubed onto Lawrence's dowdy single-mom blouses. It's a dizzy, dervish-like movie that can be read as a celebration of capitalism, an economic cautionary tale, both at once, or total political confusion á la Russell's Three Kings(1999)—but there's little allure to look closer at a movie that offers little in return for leaving you so wrung out.