Film Review: ‘Joy’ – Variety

Variety: After wholeheartedly embracing the art of the con in “American Hustle,” David O. Russell shifts gears and celebrates the virtues of honesty, grit and can-do spirit with “Joy,” a more constrained and significantly less inspired seriocomic romp cobbled together from the life of Joy Mangano, the woman who invented the Miracle Mop and turned it into a home-shopping phenomenon. If a “Eureka!” moment in the history of the household cleaning industry seems a less-than-intuitive premise for a mainstream feature film, rest assured that Russell has stretched this heavily fictionalized material about as far as it could go, though he stops well short of the screwball delirium and emotional liftoff he achieved in his recent string of triumphs. Despite another solid performance from Jennifer Lawrence, anchoring Russell’s sincerely felt tribute to the power of a woman’s resolve in a man’s world, it’s hard not to wish “Joy” were better — that its various winsome parts added up to more than a flyweight product that still feels stuck in the development stage.