FILM REVIEW : “Joy” brings lessons of life
By Gregory Mann
WHAT MAKES the magic of a life? What keeps a person trying, faltering and knocking their head against the wall until the point of success?“ The newly released “Joy“ seeks to provide the answers.
Based loosely on the life and rise of inventor and home shopping star Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), the genre-blurring story of “Joy” follows the wild path of a hard-working but half-broken family and the young girl who ultimately becomes it’s shining matriarch and leader in her own right.
Driven to create, but also to take care of those around her, Joy experiences betrayal, treachery, the loss of innocence,and the scars of love as she finds the steel and the belief to follow her.dream.
Known for his penchant for design and imaginative sets, David O. Russell makes a visual departure with “Joy”, with his most stylized take on modern life yet, one spanning not only the family living room and a gritty auto shop, but a heightened soap opera universe, a television dream factory and the wild imagination of a woman who loves create ingenious solutions to everyday problems. From the start, the idea is to view contemporary life through the lens of classic cinema, letting the two collide in fascinating ways.. The movie transportsyou into a world that feels both bott real and a enchanted. And of course that’s what the film is really about, being bold enough to fulfill your dreams. Joy’s everyday reality, and the constant tug-of-war she faces between necessity and achievement, is punctuated in bursts by hyper-melodramatic soap opera sequences, song-and-dance and surreal daydreams.
We’re not living in the easiest of times, but this story reminds us that we all have a right to try to fulfill a dream. A lot of times you’ve to pick yourself up and dust yourself off but this film says; get out there and don’t give up. This a story about empowering yourself because no one else is going to empower you. Yet, sometimes the story comes down to a single image; as with Joy and the snowflakes that seem to define something ineffable about her journey. Snow is something you fall in love with as a child but 20 years later that same snow can be a nightmare because you can’t get to work and then you can’t pay your mortgage, part of the reality of adult life.. The result is an emotional and human comedy about a woman’s rise-navigating the unforgiving world of commerce, the chaos of family and the mysteries of inspiration while finding an unyielding source of happiness.
