‘JOY’-FUL

‘JOY’-FUL

By Colin Covert

Tribune News Service

Who needs plots? Lately, some of the most alert, polished films have been ones moving in random, eccentric directions. In fact, several of them have come from writer/director David O. Russell, whose sixth sense for what audiences will enjoy brought us “The Fighter,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle.” His trademark point and counterpoint stories offer a screwball sitcom, a fairy tale with social asides, and a feel-good salute to middle-class American moral fiber all at the same time.

“Joy,” the third collaboration from Russell and his ensemble players Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, is his usual good mix of fluff and melodrama, and then some. Full of shaggy-dog charm, it’s an easy film to like.

Here he presents a somewhat true bio-drama about Joy Mangano, a pink-collar single mom who made a tough, unsteady rise to success as the inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop. It makes sense that she would see the potential value of a plastic-handled cleanup gadget, because much of her own life was messy and full of stains, especially the parts connected to marriage.

We meet Joy as a winsome gradeschooler inventively folding construction paper dream homes where she will live happily ever after. Then the giddy sensuousness of her teens (from which point she is played by the sublime Lawrence) makes her fall in love with a rakish Latino singer (Idgar Ramirez). After a rocky relationship, he transitions from husband to live-in ex, occupying the basement of Joy’s ramshackle Long Island home, and co-raising the couple’s two children.

Joy’s divorced parents multiply the difficulties further. Apathetic mom (Virginia Madsen) lives with her, camped out in a bed near the entrance, watching trashy soap operas all day long as if life’s vexations made her a shut-in invalid. Joy’s grumpy, garage owner dad (De Niro) knocks on the door for refuge when his latest wife, en route to divorce court, drops him at the household as damaged goods.

It’s all handled with low-key humor, yet there are sharp stabs of honest pain. In a scene just this side of devastating, Joy tells her best friend how scary the knife edge of disappointment is feeling. When her daughter asks for some school help to learn about cicadas, the bugs’ 17-year underground life cycle parallels the decades that Joy has been buried far from the happiness she once imagined.

While a standard women’s film would move ahead with new love blossoming and the wheels grinding loudly to a happy ending, “Joy” avoids stereotypes. Rather than yearning for rescue from a new suitor, our plucky heroine becomes her own knight in dented armor.

Her bumpy quest toward the American dream involves unending difficulties, some serious, some funny, each one testing Joy’s limits. The film wisely doesn’t present her as a glorified angel, but as a smart, ambitious ordinary woman. Much of Joy’s story gets narrated remembrances from her devoted grandmother (a nice return to the screen for the long-absent Diane Ladd). While others lay blame on Joy for all that goes wrong, Grandma sees Joy not as a stubborn screw-up but the only person who could possibly pull each needy generation of her family ahead.

It’s hard not to admire her grit as she sets up her own low-rent factory staffed with her ex-husband’s Latin American church members, or battles patent thieves, or wrestles with the home shopping channel that offers her a chance to sell her products.

You share her exhilaration when long-awaited successes begin to pile up, and admire her courage when the breakneck roller coaster heads down again. The film is not stressing just her rise as an entrepreneur, but her surprisingly touching development as an independent woman.