Review: De Niro and Lawrence shine in Joy

Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and Édgar Ramirez in Joy. Merie Weismiller Wallace / Twentieth Century Fox via AP

Joy

Director: David O Russell

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper

Three stars

Joy is a biopic about a woman who invented a mop. Granted, she's Joy Mangano, creator of Miracle Mop, the self-wringing mop that took shopping channel QVC by storm in the early 90s (and doubtlessly revolutionised household cleaning), but by its very nature a film about someone who invented a mop doesn't seem the greatest pretext.

Luckily, there's more to it than that. The team behind the film includes Oscar-nominated writer/director David O Russell, his long-time muse and currently the world's most bankable female star ­Jennifer Lawrence (the pair worked together previously on Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle), and other former collaborators in the shape of Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro.

The story is not so much about the invention of a mop as a heart-warming tale of a long-­suffering woman’s journey from a life of Cinderella-like drudgery to social and economic empowerment.

Lawrence’s Joy is the unwitting matriarch of an utterly dysfunctional family. She shares her house with her divorced parents. Her soap opera-addicted mother (Virginia Madsen) occupies an upstairs bedroom glued to the TV and eschewing human contact, while her Lothario father (De Niro) shares the basement with her own ex husband, failed singer Tony (Édgar Ramirez). There’s also Joy’s two charming but predictably needy kids and a frail grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), who is a rare bastion of sanity in the home, despite her advancing years.

Finally, meet vindictive sister Peggy, who may not live with them but couldn’t be more obnoxious to Joy if she did.

Joy has always had the ability to succeed, but life seems to have impeded her at every chance. She gives up a glittering potential academic career to care for her parents as they break down during a messy divorce, and is overshadowed by the less-gifted but less-disaster Peggy.

It's light-hearted festive fare at heart, the dysfunctional family pretext rings of the Tenenbaums or National Lampoon, while the moodily shot scenes of family debates over the finances of Joy's burgeoning mop enterprise offer, largely through De Niro's towering presence, a knowing satirical nod to classic gangster movies.

While the current murmurs of Oscars seem a little premature, both De Niro and Lawrence offer performances that give gravitas to the fairly lightweight script. The frequent scenes depicting snowfall, fairy lights and Christmas tunes suggest that Russell, at least, knows that this is basically a warm, fuzzy holiday movie. And Joy fills that role very competently.

• Joy is out in cinemas today