Joy (2015)

David O. Russell's "Joy" concerns a Long Island woman, her crowded house, and a mop. The house is the more interesting character. Three generations, an ex-husband in the basement, a father who arrives after his third divorce, a mother who has not left her bed since the Reagan administration. Into this static arrangement comes Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano, inventing her way toward a QVC fortune. The film has the shape of a triumph and the texture of a family argument that never quite ends.

The empowerment arc is present and sincere. Joy is dismissed by her half-sister, condescended to by manufacturers, and forced to seize a camera herself when a pitchman fumbles the demonstration. That is a woman building an empire against a male-dominated commerce, and the film means it. It frames the victory as individual grit, however, never as an indictment of the structures that made the fight necessary. The supporting cast is diverse on paper, with Edgar Ramírez, Dascha Polanco, and a Haitian plumber drifting through the margins. None of them are asked to comment on anything. They simply exist, which is its own quiet achievement.

Elsewhere the film is almost aggressively uninterested in the cultural battles of its moment. It celebrates entrepreneurship without irony. The villain is a fraudulent manufacturer, not the market, so the wealthy are never the problem, only the dishonest. There is no environmental conscience, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no revisionist reframing of the historical record. There remains a mild inspirational current, the sort that suggests dreams are worth pursuing and then politely stops talking. A restrained vintage. It pairs well with a Sunday afternoon and asks nothing of the drinker.