“Joy” and “Spotlight”
In
1991 Joy Mangano sold her first commercial design, the Miracle Mop, through
infomercials on the home shopping network QVC. In 1994 David O. Russell
released his first commercial feature film, Spanking the Monkey. The
initial experience of a work is hardly ever meant to be an allegorical reading
– even Orwell intended for readers to enjoy Animal Farm first as a story
about talking barnyard creatures, and only afterwards as an allegory for
Stalinist Russia – but after seeing (and, one hopes, immensely enjoying) Joy,
the new film by Russell based on the life of Mangano, viewers can very easily
fill in for themselves the connections and parallels between the life and
experiences of Mangano that Russell depicts, and the ones he himself underwent
around the same time. And it works only to make the entire endeavour even more
rewarding.
Joy
stars Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano, and though I have no idea whether
she fits the bills of appearance and manner for the real-life woman, such considerations
are secondary to the exhilarating dramatic and emotional intensity that she
imparts in the role. It seems to be the performance that Lawrence has unintentionally been training
for, for years. She arrives in the film bearing the tenacity and self-reliance
of Katniss Everdeen, the emotional precariousness (such as she then could
muster) of Tiffany Maxwell, the unfuckwithable-ness of Rosalyn Rosenfeld, and
the slight air of a superior and detached shape-shifting mutant. She adds to
this everything else she’s learned, both in her private and her public life,
inside and out of fictional roles, and is guided by Russell towards the most
full-bodied, challenging, and exultant work she’s ever given. But, after all,
she’s playing the character which, I suspect, lies closest to her
writer-director’s heart.