‘Where’s the Joy?” a husband asked during a marital dispute in Alan Rudolph’s Mortal Thoughts (1991). His flustered quest for meaning, satisfaction (and a dishwashing product) captured the irony of working-class survival and consumerism. Rudolph’s priceless perception returns in David O. Russell’s Joy. Russell’s appreciation of the drive toward meaning and satisfaction makes Joy the most enjoyable — and relatable-to — movie of the season.
More than a bio-pic about Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop, who launched an empire through TV’s QVC network, Joy offers a good-natured, unsentimental cultural analysis. It is keenly attuned to the eccentricities of what social scientists and politicians call late capitalism — although Russell knows better than to be so obvious. Like the much-missed Rudolph, who hasn’t made a film in years, Russell sees complex humor in American experience. Introducing Mangano’s hectic household, Russell embraces the mess of blended families, with conflicting personalities and ambitions, as joy.
For Russell, joy results from empathetic resolve, a quality that makes Mangano his ideal subject. Before she becomes a celebrity, Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is a supreme juggler of the difficulties in her life: raising two children in the same house with her bedridden mother (Virginia Madsen) and her doting grandmother (Diane Ladd), while her ex-husband, Tony (Édgar Ramírez) lives in the basement. Complications mount with Mangano’s father (Robert De Niro) and sister, Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm); Joy and Peggy’s rivalries are increased by their parents’ divorce and the demands of the family auto-garage business.
A cornball director would have made this a film about love of family; Russell doesn’t need to say so because you feel it in the energy of his characters’ interplay. The white working-class women share complementary temperaments yet have different personalities (true “diversity” of a sort today’s naïve university students know nothing about). The mother’s soap-opera addiction provides a template for Mangano to understand her own unconscious drama (“Funny thing about hiding, you’re even hidden from yourself”), while the grandmother evokes idealized (almost fairy-godmother) beneficence.
Russell’s soap-opera motif reflects a mode of pop-culture consciousness. He knows TV fixes certain terms of personal ambition and social potential, yet he refrains from condemning or condescending to the recent moral displacement. Instead, Joy enlarges upon this realization, adapting TV farce to depict how Mangano maintains emotional equilibrium throughout her business venture.
It’s encouraging that Russell can portray the American search for joy without returning us to Star Wars’ infantilization.
Mangano’s brave-new-world encounter with QVC executive Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) feels awed. Each is the other’s ideal: two seekers breathing the same rarefied air of achievement, anticipated fulfillment, and success. Calling Mangano and Walker’s rapport “sexy” limits it, although that’s part of Russell’s intent. In an idiosyncratic speech, Walker invokes Old Hollywood legend about mogul David O. Selznick — whom Russell names as his inspiration — meeting his future wife, actress Jennifer Jones, née Phyllis Isley. (It’s dazzlingly meta that movie-history scion Isabella Rossellini portrays an investor who gives Mangano a premonition of capitalist ruthlessness; Rossellini’s rich-lady intensity almost steals the show.) Through these analogies to Hollywood entrepreneurship, Russell advances his personal mythology: “In America, the ordinary meets the extraordinary every day.”
To describe Russell’s films as optimistic might seem to overlook the seriousness of his topics. Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle are all about identity, though not about identity politics. That irony sets him apart from his contemporaries among the American Eccentrics, who thrive on cynicism and facile politics. The essence of Russell’s humanism can be seen in Lawrence’s soft, determined face coming to resemble those of both Madsen and Ladd; the fantasy photo of Joy as a serious child (recalling Téchiné’s In the Name of My Daughter); and her sibling tension with Peggy. That the strong-woman story in this film recalls Karyn White’s Nineties R&B hit “Superwoman” is congruent with the film’s rock songs: Neil Young’s “Expecting to Fly” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Streets.” As Walker advises, “In America, all races, all classes can meet and make whatever opportunities they can.”
At this disheartened political and cultural moment, it’s encouraging that Russell can portray the American search for joy without returning us to Star Wars’ infantilization, which taught generations their consumer taste, and yet can subtly critique that taste. Consider the final scenes of magnate Mangano in two kinds of shrewd negotiation: Russell cagily presents sunlit reversals of the opening scene of The Godfather – which taught moral ambivalence to several generations. Thus, Joy isn’t just entertaining, it’s a radical proposition.
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Anomalisa is a stop-motion animated feature in which a puppet, businessman Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), travels to the Midwest to deliver a motivational speech. Bored yet? It’s the latest film by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), and, predictably, it toys with alienation and psychic displacement. New encounters and phone calls with Stone’s wife and child all are in the same anonymous male vocal tenor until Stone meets Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), another transient guest at the Le Fregoli hotel, and they have puppet sex. Bored now?
Nothing happens in Anomalisa that’s as outrageous or as funny as the 2004 Team America: World Police puppet film. Anomalisa isn’t meant to be funny or political, but its dry satire is portentous and oddball in that supercilious way that Kaufman has all but copyrighted. Of all the American Eccentric filmmakers, Kaufman is most in tune with the psychoanalytical pessimism that nihilistic film critics adore. Anomalisa dulls the pleasure of puppetry in favor of weirdness and dislocation — affecting the same dour look as Being John Malkovich, though there Kaufman was larky and director Spike Jonze showed prankish energy (he has since moved toward visual wonder). Jerky, monotonic puppets limit this film’s emotional palette. With co-director Duke Johnson, Kaufman abandons the Method overacting of his unbearable Synecdoche, New York.
#related#Turns out Anomalisa downplays sexual perversity for art-film perversity — first referencing Kubrickian hotel games, then that indie-movie favorite, ridiculing and desiccating the mundane. The yawningly middlebrow Lisa is a Red State doormat who warbles Cyndi Lauper before lying on her back. (From Tarantino punching bag to Kaufman doormat, Leigh, the finest film actress of the Nineties, has made a woeful, masochistic screen return.) Filmmakers used to study anomie as part of the modern condition; for Kaufman it’s everything — except, oh yeah, misery. Anomalisa perpetuates Kaufman’s tired, limited conceit. He would never make a movie titled Joy. Couldn’t he at least adapt Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and stop pretending to be original?