Edgar Ramirez, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro
Award nominee Jennifer Lawrence (“The Hunger Games”) paces an all-star cast in the “rags to riches” story of Joy.
“Joy” reunites Lawrence’s on-screen association with Robert De Niro (“The Godfather Part 2”) and Bradley Cooper (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) from 2012’s “Silver Linings Playbook” in this story of the title character who becomes both founder and matriarch of a powerful business dynasty.
“Joy” is both a biographical drama and comedy which was written for the screen and directed by David O. Russell (“The Fighter”). In the titular role, Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, a self-made millionairess who created her own business empire by selling cheap household equipment.
Taken from true events, we meet Mangano, a divorced mother with two children in the early 1990s when, fate would have it, she accidentally drops a glass of wine on the floor on the kitchen floor. When trying to retrieve the broken pieces, she cuts her hand on open glass shards from within the mop she used.
Which is exactly the moment when she was inspired to invent the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing kitchen mop and became an overnight success.
Cooper plays Neil Walker, an executive with America’s Home Shopping Network that Mangano often appeared on live TV to sell her wares, after which she patented many other products.
Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) comforts her daughter, Christy
Selling products via cable TV was a novelty at the time and it tug at the heartstrings of millions of American women who find housework truly boring and time consuming work.
Mangano’s “gizmos,” like the Miracle Mop, were priced to sell and boy did they ever.
Joy’s story of rising from “Basement to Penthouse” is nothing new and instantly harkens back to James J. Braddock from 2005’s “Cinderella Man” in which Braddock, out of money and down on his luck, fights the good fight and never surrenders until he wins boxing’s Heavyweight Championship of the World.
Well, Lawrence doesn’t punch out and prizefighters but her portrayal of “Joy” is equally tenacious when she raises $50,000 to pay off a Hong Kong rival who has come up with a similar product.
Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper
But it’s the film’s first half that is an uneven pace. Joy’s relationships with her father Rudy (De Niro) is patchy at best and her “life” as a business clerk at the former Eastern Airlines is, at the very least a remarkable portrait of tedium.
You have to wonder how anyone can make financial ends meet through minimum wage jobs like hers, which is why Joy takes refuge in a crowed Long Island, NY home with her mother, grandmother, children and even her ex-husband all shoved inside.
But ”Joy” really soars when she strikes it rich through the powerful TV medium of infomercials … hour long commercials seen in the wee hours of the mornig—generally before 4 a.m.—and plays continually at the heartstrings of insomniacs.
Like me.
Made for a modest Hollywood budget of $60 million, “Joy” has not been one of Lawrence’s better commercial successes, generating only $55 million in the US box office and an additional $38 million in other international territories for a worldwide total of $95 million.
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert de Niro
Winning an Oscar this week will certainly bolster the film’s chances at the international box office.
The premise of “Joy” is that when you have a great idea, even if it comes to you in a dream; write it down and make it real.
Even if someone tries to steal your invention and your dreams you can still overcome all obstacles.
All it takes is a plastic Miracle Mop!
Questions, comments or travel suggestions, write me at theruffolos @readingruffolos.com.