Joy Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Joy Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 6, 2016

Could anyone other than “it” girl Jennifer Lawrence have wrangled not just an Academy Award nomination but an actual Golden Globe win out of what is at best a pretty lightweight role like her titular turn as Joy? Joy has no outsized ambitions, and indeed Lawrence has little chance to display over the top histrionics which tend to net award season recognition (if not outright trophies). The film is a kind of a long shaggy dog story, or perhaps more accurately a “shaggy mop” story, and indeed its more or less true life tale of a harried single mother coming up with an innovative design for a household aid that few would think of as “riveting” subject material is perhaps Joy’s most singular achievement. But the film ping pongs among so many characters and (admittedly interrelated) plot points that it never really achieves much in the way of momentum. Joy is never less than fun to watch, and its game cast of seasoned professionals assures a confident performance environment, but this is a rather odd third “at bat” for Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and writer-director David O. Russell, after the acclaimed Silver Linings Playbook and somewhat less rapturously received American Hustle, suggesting perhaps that the law of diminshing returns has kicked in rather pointedly.

Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence) is a harried divorcée trying to navigate the treacherous waters of shepherding her children through a relatively normal home life while also living there with her soap opera addicted mother Terri (Virginia Madsen, de-glammed like never before) and, rather incredibly, her ex-husband Tony (Édgar Ramírez), a would be pop singer whose lack of career success has relegated him to living in Joy’s basement like a quasi-adult child who returns home after college when employment doesn’t pan out as expected. Things get even more chaotic when Joy’s Dad, Terri’s ex-husband Rudy (Robert De Niro), is also forced to return home when his current main squeeze can’t stand living with him anymore. Just for good measure, Joy’s grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), a character who narrates the proceedings, is also on hand, though she at least seems to have Joy’s best interests at heart.

Russell’s screenplay quickly develops the idea that Joy has long been an enterprising inventor, including a fluorescently lit dog collar she came up with as a little girl that evidently became a hot item (the film glosses over this actually rather interesting sidebar to the main story). Dreams of a future spent thinking up and then making a vast array of items have given way to the harsh realities to everyday working life as a ticket agent at the airport, though Mimi still encourages Joy to keep dreaming. Russell probably tries a bit too hard to inject some “meaning” into the proceedings by having Joy read a story about cicadas to her daughter, a story which goes into the weird phenomenon of the insects more or less hibernating for 17 years at a stretch, something that then plays into Joy’s sudden “resurgence” as an inventor (after 17 fallow years) when a shipboard accident causes her to rethink one of the most mundane items ever imagined—the everyday household mop.

That sets up the main part of the film, where Joy enlists the financial aid of Rudy’s latest main squeeze, a wealthy woman named Trudy (Isabella Rossellinni), in order to create a prototype and hopefully ultimately sell her product. Joy keeps throwing obstacles at Joy for virtually the entire subsequent length of the film, with a number of nefarious types attempting to undercut her success, and her own newness to the “art of the deal” (if one might purloin a phrase from our current election cycle) also adding into the fray. She ultimately finds a partner of sorts in QVC executive Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), who sees a naturalness in Joy’s demeanor which is dramatically different from the more polished and “professional” salespeople who populate his home shopping network.

Some of the more twee elements in Russell’s screenplay seem awfully forced, including the whimsical narration, the aforementioned cicada reference and most weirdly Joy’s “travels” into the soap opera that her mother is always watching. (These segments at least offer the blandishments of the always entertaining Susan Lucci, sending up her own long established soap operatic persona.) It’s as if Russell wants to distract us from the simplicity of the story, something he’s actually able to do due to persistence if nothing else.

At its core and despite a lot of stylistic flourishes, Joy is in essence nothing more than the tale of a scrappy single working woman who defies the odds and becomes a success in order to better not just her life, but that of her daughter. As such, it plays almost like a 21st century Mildred Pierce, albeit without the, you know, melodramatic murders and stuff. Russell fills the film with all sorts of nice little bits for the characters, but the overall feeling of the film is disjointed and surprisingly formulaic. Performances are winning from top to bottom, but again this is hardly material that forces its actors to stretch very far. There’s an appealingly “loosey goosey” ambience to much of Joy, and it’s that air of nonchalance that actually helps the film to weather some of its more rote aspects.

Joy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Joy is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Defying the current trend toward digital capture, Russell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren shot this on good old fashioned Super 35, something that gives the film a kind of old school quality at times. Sandgren is on record discussing his use of pull processing and overexposure to develop Joy's rather distinctive if almost subliminal look. One of the interesting things about the stylistic choices in this regard is the slightly desaturated, cooly blue appearance that's offered in several flashback sequences (see screenshots 7 and 12). Much of the "contemporary" sequences are color graded either toward the blue or yellow side of things (clearly seen in several screenshots accompanying this review), though detail levels remain commendably high throughout. Several other sequences have been intentionally tweaked in post to resemble old video, as in the wedding flashback scene (see screenshot 13) or some of the recurrent soap opera segments (see screenshots 6 and 10), and detail levels understandably fluctuate in these moments. The film pops best and offers the greatest degrees of sharpness in brightly lit scenes like the outdoor sequence where red wine on a boat deck inspires Joy's idea for a mop, or, later, in the pristine and near blooming white environment of the television studio. There are no issues with image instability and no problematic compression artifacts to contend with.

Joy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Joy features a nice sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 which whips up surprising amounts of surround activity in busy environments like Joy's chaotic home or the chaos of a television studio. Ambient environmental effects regularly dot the surround channels, but the mix intelligently handles more subtle elements like the nonstop sound emanating from the television in Joy's mother's bedroom. Dialogue is presented cleanly and clearly and the many source cues are cleanly delivered with good prioritization.

Joy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Joy, Strength and Perseverance (1080p; 20:21) is an appealing EPK with some good interviews.


• Times Talk with Jennifer Lawrence and David O. Russell and Maureen Dowd (1080i; 1:07:42) is an interesting and far ranging interview conducted by Dowd.


• Gallery (1080p; 00:38) offers both Auto Advance and Manual Advance options. The timing is for the Auto Advance option.

Joy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Joy, much like its titular character, is sweet, amiable and persistent. It's hard to know what exactly Russell wanted to convey with this film, though, for it kind of comes off as a real life "Fractured Fairy Tale", with an improbable heroine surrounded by a bunch of dunces or worse. Russell's tendency toward the overly precious and whimsical tends to undercut any suspense or ultimately true emotional attachment to the hurdles Joy faces, since the tone is so relentlessly light so much of the time. Performances keep things appropriately soufflé like most of the time, and while this is probably the least effective collaboration between Russell, Lawrence and Cooper (and/or De Niro), it still is goofily enjoyable on its own small scale terms. Technical merits are strong, and Joy comes Recommended.