Do you have a video playback issues?
Please disable AdBlocker in your browser for our website.
Due to a high volume of active users and service overload, we had to decrease the quality of video streaming. Premium users remains with the highest video quality available. Sorry for the inconvinience it may cause. Donate to keep project running.
Joy revolves around Joy Mangano, a divorced mother of two children, through four generations as founds a business dynasty after creating the Miracle Mop 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.