Film review: Joy | The Danish Girl | Sleeping With Other People

Jennifer Lawrence lifts Joy, a rags-to-riches biopic of a single mother who becomes a millionaire inventor. Alistair Harkness also reviews The Danish Girl, Sleeping With Other People and the rest of this week’s new releases

Joy (15) | Rating: *** | Directed by: David O Russell | Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Diane Ladd, Edgar Ramirez

David O Russell has a real skill for embracing played-out genre tropes and using them to craft subversive dramas that pulsate with the chaos and comedy of real life. But the director of The Fighter and Silver Lining’s Playbook doesn’t quite pull off this fairytale-riffing biopic of entrepreneur Joy Mangano, who built a business empire in the 1990s after inventing the self-wringing Miracle Mop and becoming a star on the home-shopping TV network QVC. Taking aspects of Cinderella and conflating them with the sort underdog tale that gives true life success stories their inspirational, dream-like quality, it’s an ambitious film and boasts another remarkable lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence (her third collaboration with Russell after Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle). Yet there’s something about the way Russell deliberately drapes the film in phoniness that prevents the reality he’s getting at from punching through.

The film begins with Joy as a bright, energetic and inventive child, one who’s imbued with confidence by her grandmother (Diane Ladd, who also serves as the film’s narrator) but who nevertheless grows up to become a harassed single mother of three. Her much-discussed destiny as the family savior has seemingly condemned her to a life of domestic servitude, running around looking after her agoraphobic mother (Virginia Madsen), her grandmother, and her divorced father (Robert De Niro), in addition to her children and her useless ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez). “I feel like I’m in a prison,” says Joy early on and it’s not hard to see why: she’s lost touch with the little girl who dreamed of being an inventor, having succumbed instead to the more toxic side of the fairytale myth by falling for a prince who in reality turned out to be an unemployed nightclub singer, one who continues to live in the basement of her house two years on from their divorce.

Dysfunctional families are, of course, Russell’s forte, going right back to his debut Spanking the Monkey. Here he heightens the Mangano clan’s negative qualities to maintain the film’s fairytale vibe, turning them into almost ghoulish caricatures, seemingly sent to test Joy’s mettle. He intensifies the artificiality in other ways too, mainly by dropping us into the hokey melodrama of the soap opera Joy’s mother watches on TV all day, its corny storylines of full of comical intrigue and betrayal, but foreshadowing the soap opera Joy’s life is about to become once she invents the Miracle Mop. The idea for the mop itself is presented as a Eureka moment, the stupidity of the details going somewhat unchallenged by Russell and his co-screenwriter Annie Mamola (Bridesmaids). On a winter outing on a boat belonging to her father’s latest romantic partner (a wealthy widower played by Isabella Rossellini), Joy finds herself cleaning up red wine and broken glass with a mop, ringing the latter out with her hands for some reason and ending up with shards of glass embedded in her skin. Instead of resolving to use a bucket in future (as most people would), she invents a super-absorbent self-wringing mop, and in the process begins re-inventing herself as a success.

The film wrings plenty of drama out of the trials Joy has to go through to get her product up and running. Nothing comes easily and, having already set things up as a story of “daring women … one especially”, Russell understands there’s a certain thrill to be had watching her face these obstacles. Lawrence is perfectly cast as the irrepressible entrepreneur risking financial ruin when she doesn’t have a cent to her name, but it’s only when Joy gets involved with shopping channel QVC that Russell starts hitting his own stride as a filmmaker. Dropping us into this strange world in much the same way he does the soap opera segments earlier in the film, he blurs reality, exposing the Hollywood influenced theatricality of the channel – particularly its techniques for boosting sales – as a way of showing us the extent to which Joy’s success depends on finding a way to present “real life” to the public in a marketable format. In part he’s arguing that this is the beginning of “reality TV”, but he’s also making a sly comment on the way movies – especially movies like this – work: using movie stars to sell audiences on hope-filled stories about impossible dreams coming true.

The film is aided here by Bradley Cooper. Playing the boss of QVC who gives Joy her first break, he rekindles some of the chemistry he had with Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, albeit in a strictly platonic, business partner way. Russell gets good performances too from the rest of his cast – though for someone so skilled at working with starry ensembles, it’s frustrating that some of the characters – Joy’s mother and Joy’s ex especially – remain one-dimensional, never really transcending their fairytale function. Appropriately enough, though, Lawrence saves the day and the film’s seasonally appropriate ending ensures the title is justified in more ways than one.

The Danish Girl (15) | Rating: ** | Directed by: Tom Hooper | Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Ben Wishaw

The cult of Eddie Redmayne is a curious thing: as an actor he’s OK, but this whole “transformative” skill he seems to be getting praised for of late is a little unwarranted.

His Oscar-winning turn as Stephen Hawking in last year’s turgid biopic The Theory of Everything didn’t strike me as much more than a young actor worshipping at the left foot of Daniel Day-Lewis. His latest performance, in The Danish Girl as pioneering transgender artist Lili Elbe, seems even more calculated: a blatant piece of lifeless awards-bait built entirely around the supposed bravery of a Hollywood-conquering Brit actor playing a transgender character.

Which isn’t to say Lili’s story isn’t historically interesting – it is, and perhaps in the hands of an edgier director than Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, Les Miserables) the emotional and physical journey she underwent might have made for a a fascinating film.

But as a portrait of an artist it feels authentic only in as much as the experience of watching it is akin to watching paint dry.

The film begins in 1926 when Lili was still Einar Wegener – “the best landscape painter in all of Denmark,” as one character helpfully explains. Happily married, his wife, Gerda (Alica Vikander) is also a painter, but is somewhat less distinguished than her husband, having not yet found her ideal subject.

That fact emerges when, on a whim, she asks Einer to sit in as a life model when her dancer friend (Amber Heard) is running late for a portrait. Slipping on stockings and dainty ballet shoes, he’s enthralled by the sensation, something Hooper conveys with lots of shallow-focus close-ups that blur the edges of the frame to concentrate our attention on the detail of the moment.

The idea here is that art lets us see things lurking within us that we can’t always express or articulate and the rest of the film is really about how Einer, with Gerda’s help and permission, becomes the person he’s always felt that he was. It’s when he starts venturing out in public as Lili that these feelings start to take over – as Gerda’s paintings bring them much success and attention, Lili begins to feel increasingly imprisoned by her old identity.

The film runs through some of the terrible psychiatric and medical interventions Elbe had to endure before finally undergoing experimental gender reassignment surgery – with tragic results.

Alas, this all presented in such a shallow and dry way that it’s hard to engage with any of it emotionally, and the same goes for Redmayne’s performance – it’s all surface, never really getting beyond his willingness to look pretty in a dress.

Sleeping With Other People (15) | Rating: **** | Directed by: Leslye Headland | Starring: Alison Brie, Jason Sudeikis, Adam Scott, Adam Brody

This spiky romantic comedy from Bachelorette writer/director Leslye Headland nails the kind of mania that occurs when love forces people to behave like high-functioning addicts. Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie star as Jake and Lainey, former college friends-with-benefits (they slept together once) who reconnect years later and make a deal to deny their crazy chemistry in order to become confidants for each other in their pursuit of more workable relationships. For glib womaniser Jake that means trying to get over his compulsive determination to protect himself against future heartache by sabotaging things before they have a chance to develop into anything meaningful; for Lainey it’s about trying to get over her obsession with Matthew (Adam Scott), an about-to-be-married doctor with whom she’s been having an on/off affair since before she even met Jake.

As with Headland’s cult debut, the ensuing film is a funny, somewhat raucous affair that embraces as many rom-com conventions as it subverts. But even as it works towards its crowd-pleasing finale, it stays true to the reality of its protagonists’ romantic predicaments, especially the potentially damaging ripple effect that denying your true feelings can have on your own life and the lives of those with whom you choose to share it.

Sherpa (15) | Rating: **** | Directed by: Jennifer Peedom

The blinkered view that we should care about a bunch of wealthy Western adventure-seekers getting trapped on a mountain was one of the many things that blighted the rubbish blockbuster movie Everest recently, particularly as it barely bothered to acknowledge the integral role Sherpas play in getting people up the mountain. Redressing the balance, however, is this eye-opening documentary from Jennifer Peedom, who was on the mountain around the time that Everest was being filmed – the production is referred to obliquely – and found herself with a real story to tell when an avalanche killed 16 Sherpas and resulted in their colleagues effectively going on strike to protest against the way their lives and skills have been exploited over the years by commercial expeditions. The footage she gets of the ensuing stand-off is genuinely revelatory and lays bare some of the ugly racist attitudes held by Western climbers who pay tens of thousands of dollars to tick ascending Everest off their bucket lists.

At Any Price (18) | Rating: ** | Directed by: Ramin Bahrani | Starring: Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron, Heather Graham

With his past movies Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo and the recent 99 Holmes, Ramin Bahrani has established himself as America’s answer to Ken Loach. He’s intent on making movies with a social conscience. If At Any Price is anything to go by, he’s also a filmmaker who shares Loach’s heavy-handed approach to drama. Sitting on a shelf since 2013, the film stars Dennis Quaid as a farmer who’s resorted to cutting corners to maintain his profit margins in economically uncertain times. But he’s also alienated his fellow farmers and his sons, particularly his youngest, played by Zac Efron, who rejects his father’s ideals and harbours dreams of becoming a racing driver. It’s a little hokey and prone to melodramatic twists, and when it’s not indulging in heavy-handed symbolism, it resorts to dialogue that flat out lectures us on the human cost of applying mercenary business values to everything in life.