Joy

When Joy stands in the street in the snowfall at the end of the film the snow is obviously false — large hunks of blown bits of foam. But that’s the film: a real life soap opera about the mix of myth and reality that makes up the American Dream. That’s why the film opens on a soap opera scene as it occurs on the set, which we later see narrowed down and reframed for the TV screen. The film weaves together fiction and life, truth and lies, connections and betrayals, all tightly wound — like a self-wringing mop.

David Russell uses the real-life story of Joy Mangano to demonstrate the mix of ambition and failure, possibility and fiction, that makes up the myth that America is the land of opportunity where anyone can realize their dream.

For the bulk of the movie the title and the heroine’s name seem a bitterly ironic taunt. Joy knows no joy. The brightest kid at school, class valedictorian, a dreamy and creative fantasist and inventor, she leaves her brilliant future behind her when she abandons college to look after her just divorced mother. 

Mother Terry spends her life on her bed watching the soaps, leaving Joy to tend to her and Joy’s two tots. The soaps star real-life soap stars (e.g., Susan Lucci, Laura Wright) in an invented saga of the disasters and tribulations of a successful businesswoman. They are a retreat from reality for Terry but a bitter foreshadowing of Joy’s business life. Casting real-life soap stars as fictional soap stars is another variation on the mix of fiction and reality. So is casting Joan Rivers’ daughter as Joan Rivers. 

Joy’s husband Tony is a victim of the American Dream. The Portuguese immigrant dreams of becoming a successful singer. Two years after the divorce he’s still living in Joy’s basement rehearsing for his dead end local club gigs. He won’t be the next Tom Jones. He embodies the failure of the dream success. Still, he has the character to remain Joy’s friend and protector. He’s proved right to reject the advice forced on her by Joy’s financier and father.

In contrast to Tony is the Haitian plumber Toussaint, who comes in to fix a broken pipe under Terry’s floorboards but stays to break through her antagonistic shell into an apparent relationship. This is the American Dream working at a modest level, giving an immigrant the chance to live a modest success without unrealistic aspirations of glory. Toussaint has the character to live a realistic ambition that Tony lacks. 

Joy’s father Rudy is another modest American success story, a small auto body business owner. When he hooks up with a wealthy widow, Trudy, he succeeds her Morris whose hard work left her with a fortune. Joy turns to her to help fund her invention of an advanced mop, but Trudy keeps her in constant uncertainty and humiliation. Even after her success, Trudy and Rudy force her into premature bankruptcy, Rudy undermines Joy’s business strategy, and — as the narrator reveals at the end — lost an attempt to sue her for possession of her entire company. 

     This is not the Father Knows Best American family. To the contrary, Joy’s parents remain violently bitter even after their divorce. Rudy’s other daughter Peggy, by his first wife, is jealous of and antagonistic to Joy. She conspires with Rudy against Joy. At her lowest point, when it appears Joy will lose her mop patent and company to her fraudulent parts supplier, Rudy apologizes to her for having nourished her delusions of being special. 

The only positive figures in Joy’s life are her grandmother Mimi and her own little daughter. Joy isn’t presented as an American Dreamer but as a self-reliant, creative woman who, having been clobbered by life, resolves to pull herself out of the dump. The obstacles amass but she forges on. She doesn’t go on the shopping TV channel because she wants to become a star but because she thinks she can do a better job selling her mop than the channel’s star seller but hapless mopper could. Joy is a success because she knows her own abilities and does not accept either defeat or her family’s discouragement. 

Granny Mimi appreciates Joy’s qualities and encourages her. As the film moves between the reality and the fiction of American success Mimi continues as our narrator even after she dies. Fiction outlives reality.

That’s the thing about the American Dream. There is an element of truth to it — America is the land of opportunity. But there are no more guarantees about its rewards than there are about the prospects of a successful marriage — as Rudy drunkenly and viciously rails at his daughter’s wedding. America, like families and like life, offers opportunities but with it dangers, threats, betrayals, disappointments and terrible dishonesties. Ultimately there is no dream promise in America, only what you make and find in yourself.
     Perhaps the film’s central emblem is Joy’s mop. It’s a dense weaving of cotton strands that are far more absorbent than earlier mops. Like Joy it can simply take more. It can be wrung without touching the dirtied head, which can be removed and tossed into the washer. This film is a dense, complex, inventive twist of a story that comes clean on success and failure in American families and business.