Joy Review

No Joy

Joy

Director: David O Russell

Stars : Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Bradley Cooper

It came out in the US on Christmas Day and it’s out in the UK from New Year’s Day so David O Russell’s Joy is here at last. Russell is a very idiosyncratic director. Silver Linings Playbook was a touching drama with a difference but American Hustle was a film so in love with its concept that it forgot that a drama needs tension. Joy is about the titular young girl who lives with her father (Rudy, Robert DeNiro) who finds success in life thanks to inventing a mop that becomes a big hit on a home shopping channel. Bradley Cooper plays the head of the home shopping channel Neil Walker while the rest of the supporting cast includes Diane Ladd as grandmother Mimi and Virginia Madsen as her mother Terry.The cast are very decent especially Ladd and Madsen but it’s not enough. DeNiro now seems doomed to play the eccentric father figure in wilfully obscure drama films like this one.

Joy was presumably designed as a weird rags to riches story but despite a strong cast, there is something singularly unengaging about the film. Lawrence is good as Joy, a single mother who has to juggle bringing up a small boy with dreams of a better life but there is something missing here. You just shrug your shoulders at the end when Joy gets everything she wants. It will obviously get a number of Oscar nods this month but Joy is arguably Russell at his most directionless and frustrating.

JOEL MEADOWS