Joy

JOY                 B-                   

USA  (124 mi)  2015  d:  David O. Russell                Official site

Another oddball piece for David O. Russell, among his more idiosyncratic works that seem to relish their own absurd dysfunction, leading the audience through a circuitous path that includes weird family meltdowns and abysmal financial failure, where all hopes and dreams are shattered and the audience is forced to endure a heroine that is literally wiped off the mat, forced to admit her abject failure before, by some miracle, the situation changes, leading to a fairy tale ending that bears little resemblance to everything that came before, perhaps suggesting there is a tenuous line between success and failure.  Perhaps most improbable of all, and likely undetected by most viewers following the sheer lunacy in which the way the story is told, is that the film is actually a quirky biopic based on a real-life person, Joy Mangano, one of the producers of the film and the inventor of the Miracle Mop, her first product, but also the inventor of over 100 patents, including Huggable Hangers, the best-selling product in the history of the Home Shopping Network.  After starting her career at QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience), an international shopping network, by selling an astounding 18,000 mops in just 20 minutes, she founded her own company, Ingenious Designs LLC, eventually becoming the face of the Home Shopping Network, where she remains one of their most successful sellers, with annual sales topping $150 million.  As of 2015, her net worth is around $50 million according to Joy Mangano Net Worth | Celebrity Net Worth, yet none of this is known to audiences ahead of time, instead there is a simple opening dedication, “Inspired by the true stories of daring women.  One in particular.”  Most may be unfamiliar with Joy Mangano, but will only know about her on the strength of Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, where for most of the film she’s a struggling, unemployed housewife just trying to keep her beleaguered family together, as it appears to have ample opportunities to implode upon itself.   

The third consecutive pairing of actress Jennifer Lawrence along with actors Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro working with this director, after Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013), Russell uses an interesting narrative structure, interweaving scenes from a televised soap opera, including legendary soap actors Susan Lucci from the now cancelled All My Children, and from General Hospital, Donna Mills, Laura Wright, and Maurice Benard, showing them in full melodramatic mode, resorting to the use of a gun to protect some underhanded family embezzlement, living in a hyper-traumatic universe that is artificially inspired, creating a parallel world with that of the living, but this holds the rapt attention of Joy’s mother Terri, played by a near unrecognizable Virginia Madsen, who literally never gets out of bed, living a life consumed by watching soap operas.  Still distraught over her failed marriage, she goes ballistics every time her divorced husband (and Joy’s father) shows up, Rudy (Robert De Niro), immediately erupting in a shouting match, with Rudy inevitably trying to take charge in the worst manner imaginable, like a bull in a China shop, breaking things on the floor that Joy is obliged to clean up afterwards.  Joy’s marriage has crumbled as well, though amicably, apparently, as her ex-husband Tony (Édgar Ramírez), an aspiring, out of work musician is living in the basement, while Joy and her two young children live with her mother and grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), who provides an all-knowing narration, seemingly aware of the present, past, and future, reminding viewers that she always found something special in Joy, knowing that she would be successful if she just follows her dreams.  This sunny, overly optimistic view contrasts drastically with the financially dire and often contentious surroundings of this household, where the family is in a constant state of friction.  Yet in flashback mode, we see her picture book wedding, which looks like it could have been shot during THE GODFATHER (1972), including a blissful rendition of Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid,” Jennifer Lawrence and Edgar Ramirez Sing ... - YouTube (2:19), while even earlier we see her at age ten playing with her best friend Jackie, showing meticulous care in cutting and folding white paper, creating an exquisite imaginary world that she keeps in a box by the side of her bed.

The internalized mindset of the story seems to be an age of self-inflicted narcissism set to the sounds of Cream singing “I Feel Free,” Cream - I Feel Free - YouTube (2:44), revealing an out-of-control family on the verge of collapse, where Joy is the only one bringing home a paycheck and the only thing holding it all together, as everyone else is pretty much useless, thinking only about themselves, where their exclusive self-centered views are continually exasperating.  Graduating from her Long Island high school at the top of her class, Joy avoided college to pick up the pieces of her parent’s failed marriage, eventually helping do the books for her father’s auto-body business, putting her constantly at odds with Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm), Rudy’s same-age daughter from another marriage, who undermines her every chance she gets.  This petty squabbling literally defines the picture, becoming a crumbling glimpse of a middle class family teetering on the edge, where it’s impossible to think anything good could come out of this continual dysfunction.  But Joy still has a best friend in Jackie (Dascha Polanco), someone who has always believed in her, her grandmother’s continual optimism, and her own unfailing belief in herself, so when she enthusiastically comes up with the bare outlines of a business project, creating a self-cleaning mop that simply outcleans the competition, she does what any young entrepreneur would do under the circumstances, ask for help, and money, from her family, which includes her father’s new girlfriend named Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), a wealthy widow with a fiercely protective interest in her late husband’s fortune.  While it’s all somewhat amateurish, where she’s inclined to place too much trust in her partners, the film does a good job in demonstrating just how significant the hurdles are in any startup business, where all the significant investments and major decisions are made prior to seeing any returns, where some investors blink when they see the amount of incurred debt and get cold feet.  Where Joy goes wrong is thinking others in the family share her same interest, where it’s curious how quickly they drop her to protect their own financial bottom line, adding to the cyclical picture of family dysfunction.  While every rags to riches story is unique, and behind every success story are a multitude of projects that fail, this film incredulously spends more time on all the things that went wrong, leading to moments of utter disillusionment, where many in the audience literally gasp that this could be happening in a Jennifer Lawrence movie, who may as well be America’s sweetheart, where her one opportunity for success may end in financial ruin.  It’s a dizzyingly complicated finale, where it gets more than a little convoluted along the way, as there are literally dozens of impasses and side roads, each more improbable than the last, turning into some kind of international corporate espionage tale, yet somehow she prevails.  It gets a bit tricky how she pulls herself out of the abyss, and it’s not for the faint of heart, but the underlying message is not how you respond to success, but to setbacks incurred along the way, where how you overcome adversity is what makes all the difference. 

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE       B             

USA  (112 mi)  1974  d:  Martin Scorsese

A change of pace for Scorsese, his first Hollywood studio production while making one of the few women’s pictures in his career, along with Boxcar Bertha (1972), New York, New York (1977), and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993), where Ellen Burstyn won an Academy Award as Best Actress for her role.  Burstyn had creative control of the movie from the start, as Warner Brothers was so impressed with her work in THE EXORCIST (1973) that they kept sending her scripts and gave her complete control over her next film.  According to Burstyn, “It was early in the Woman’s Movement, and we were all just waking up and having a look at the pattern of our lives and wanting it to be different… I wanted to make a different kind of film, a film from a woman’s point of view, but a woman that I recognized, that I knew, and not just myself, but my friends, what we were all going through at the time. So my agent found Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”  The opening sequence is one of the most remarkable in Scorsese’s entire career, spending two and a half times more money just for the opening set ($85,000) than he did for his entire first film, where after spending weeks building it, on the day of the shoot he was told by a child welfare worker that the child actress (Mia Bendixsen) was not allowed to speak any profanity, which is the kicker line in the opening sequence.  Fortunately Scorsese already recorded an earlier screen test shot, which is the one used in the film.  Opening in a WIZARD OF OZ (1939) dream world with a William Cameron Menzies style tinted red sky that accompanies a young girl’s dreams of becoming a star, that quickly cuts from this highly stylized, artificially illuminated fantasy childhood into a spectacular outdoor crane shot that purposefully jolts the audience ahead 27 years, adding some raucous energy from Mott the Hoople that much of the rest of the film lacks, where the would-be star finds herself sitting at a sewing machine, already consumed by the boring reality of day to day existence Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore -- (Movie Clip ... YouTube (4:00).  What’s immediately apparent is the film is not written by Scorsese, so it lacks much of the personal insight and fresh spontaneity of Mean Streets (1973), feeling like a more generic story that attempts to play upon populist themes.  Being a Scorsese film, however, there are highly inventive musical choices, well developed characters, and some stunning visual composition, again shot by Kent Wakeford in his last film working with the director.   

While some may find this film refreshingly honest, it’s also a film that pushes all the buttons it intended to push, as it feels at times like a movie with a feminist social agenda, much like Jill Clayburgh in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978), while at other times it’s much more risky in the way it freely allows characters to evolve naturally, where they don’t hide the growing pains of attempting to deal with the chaos in their lives.  At times it feels overwrought, where the weight of the world always falls upon Burstyn’s shoulders, where her performance often feels too showy, which is highly unusual for her, as after a long career in television, she made quite an impact with her brilliantly understated performances in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971) and THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972), where she tends to exhibit wise-beyond-her-years, rock steady characteristics even as her world is falling apart.  Here, there are plenty of scenes where she just lets it go.  Trapped in a dysfunctional marriage with an emotionally stunted husband (Billy Green Bush), the man is just impossible to please, despite Alice’s most determined efforts, where apparently fighting is part of their family life, each with one another.  When her husband dies in a traffic fatality, it’s as if a part of her world had been sucked away, as she was used to relying upon her husband to pay the bills, sacrificing her earlier dreams of being a singer, as her husband didn’t want his wife to work.  One of the more memorable early sequences is seeing Burstyn with Lelia Goldoni as Bea, from Cassavetes’ SHADOWS (1959), onscreen together as neighbors and best friends, as Goldoni happened to be one of Burstyn’s real-life best friends at the time, so their affectionate camaraderie feels authentic.  Nonetheless, Alice and her 11-year old son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) hop in a car and hit the road, with recollections that her happiest times were in her home town of Monterey, California, thinking she could revive her singing career.  But California is quite a distance, and that costs money, where most of the film was actually shot on location in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, so she doesn’t get very far when she has to get up her nerve and look for a job, culminating in this breathy but intoxicatingly feminine audition which lands her a job Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese) Pian  YouTube (3:37).

Fresh from Scorsese’s last few films, Harvey Keitel makes another memorable appearance here as Ben, a regular customer who takes a shine to Alice, devoting plenty of time and attention that she initially deflects, but she eventually warms up to the guy, even as she knows little about him.  No one could possibly anticipate just how far Keitel takes this film over the edge, as it’s a brilliantly explosive scenario that comes to a quick end as they hightail it out of town, landing in Phoenix where Alice reluctantly gets a job as a waitress in Mel & Ruby’s Café, aka: Mel’s Diner (since Ruby’s long gone), a real-life diner located at 1747 NW Grand Avenue that is still in operation in Phoenix, the greasy spoon diner which was the setting for the spin-off TV series called Alice (1976 – 1985), where Vic Tayback plays Mel the cook in both.  Diane Ladd as the foul-mouthed and sexually charged Flo, and Valerie Curtin as the always spaced out Vera, play the other two waitresses, where after a brief battle of wills, Flo and Alice bury the hatchet and become friends, beautifully expressed here in a near surreal visualization Ellen Burstyn and Diane Ladd in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Any YouTube (1:45).  Add to the mix Kris Kristofferson as David, a local rancher who becomes Alice’s regular customer and new love interest, while also bursting onto the scene is a young child actress named Jodie Foster, an iconic figure from Scorsese’s next film TAXI DRIVER (1976), playing young Audrey Jodie Foster in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) YouTube (4:37), a local girl that schools Tommy on how to shoplift and drink cheap Ripple wine, who after an arrest utters the memorable phrase “So long, suckers!” as her mother embarrassingly drags her out of the police station.  One of the more novel dynamics of the picture is the mother and son relationship, where the child must be devastated at being cooped up in a motel room all day during the summer months while his mother goes off to work, which is a nice contrast with the mother’s annoyance at being imprisoned by a small child who relentlessly demands all of her attention over and over again.  Although Burstyn has an achingly real sequence in a disarming moment where she acts out a childhood vaudeville routine, Keitel, Diane Ladd and Jodie Foster add needed spice and personality to this film, where the secondary characters are often more fun than the leads, where their spark and originality make this more than a conscious raising film coming early in the Women’s Movement of the 60’s and 70’s.  This is a film where women as well as men should re-examine their own lives, change or re-evaluate their perspectives, and reflect upon the old values of compliance and obedience in the role of a dutiful wife.  While the film does emphasize women’s issues, shifting to a position of empowerment, it’s certainly not a radical film in any respect, especially with such a conventional (or cop out) ending, much to the disappointment of many, feeling exactly like the end of An Unmarried Woman, where in both, despite being labeled feminist or women’s films, women were not yet ready to completely let go of the idea of needing a man.