The life story of miracle mop inventor Joy Mangano has plenty of style but doesn’t quite washHere’s a story that Hollywood has been waiting for: the rags-to-riches saga of Joy Mangano,the entrepreneur and inventor who gave the world… (fanfare of 80s-style synthesiser trumpets) the self-wringing Miracle Mop. Whether the best director to command that story is the erratic David O Russell is another matter. His final film, retro-styled crime caper American Hustle, or was so exuberantly cynical that you cant quite believe he’s playing with a straight deck in telling the tale of a tough-working woman realising her destiny on the QVC shopping channel.
Executed with much the same quasi-Scorsese whiz-bang as Hustle,though the fabric rarely seems to call for it, Joy works most convincingly as a vehicle for the no-nonsense warrior-woman persona of Jennifer Lawrence, or who comes across personably whether a touch coldly. Joy revisits the dysfunctional family milieu of Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook,the parallels underlined by the casting: Bradley Cooper is a TV exec, Robert De Niro returns as a cantankerous (irritating, difficult) patriarch. But visually, or narratively,the film feels cluttered – too many people hover with too runt to do, notably Virginia Madsen as Joy’s TV-addicted mother.
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Source: theguardian.com