45 Years

Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is a seismograph of internal feelings, suppressions and revelations. 

In the week before the couple’s 45th anniversary Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) learn that his girlfriend who died in a climbing accident in Switzerland 45 years ago has been discovered frozen in the ice. 

From his first remark, “My Katya,” Kate feels her relationship undermined. He hasn’t forgotten his first great love, nor fully informed her. As she later says, she fears he did not think she was wife enough for him. Perhaps it was in order to shield her from such discomfiting knowledge, Geoff kept back secrets from her, including that Katya died pregnant and that they had passed themselves off as married. His protection — ostensibly of his wife but perhaps primarily of himself — over the years undercuts her trust and security now. 

The discovery of a body buried in ice is the film’s most compelling metaphor. It signifies any secret or passion attempted to be hidden. Geoff didn’t tell Kate enough about that relationship because he didn’t want to confront it fully himself. Burial seems easier.  

Geoff himself speculates what it would be like seeing Katya now, preserved from age and decay, after he has aged into shrivelled debility. Where Kate has aged along with him, Katya has enjoyed the luxury of agelessness, preserved in his mind unchanged, idealised. The homonymy of Kate and Katya is significant — Kate subbed for Katya, but as a live presence. 

In her most crucial speech Kate says that Katya’s constant but unrecognized presence in their marriage lay behind all their major and even minor decisions. Geoff bought her Katya’s perfume, chose their holiday trips to avoid his Swiss memories and probably decided they would have dogs but not children. Having lost his first pregnant love he would not risk another. His aversion was contagious: Kate plans to buy him an anniversary watch but declines when the display is of Swiss watches.

So, too, Geoff’s rejection of family photos. He preserves his cache of Katya pictures, however secreted in the attic, but they have not taken and hung pictures of Kate and him, or the dogs. The film’s first metaphor occurs in the opening titles, which appear to the click of a slide projector. This sets up the attic scene where Kate discovers the slides of Katya, including the disturbing image of her pregnancy. The early scenes are in the shadow of that heard but unseen projector and the Katya truths it withholds. 

The other major metaphor is fissure. Katya fell into a fissure in the glacier. Now her rediscovery creates a fissure in Geoff’s and Kate’s marriage. As Kate discovers Geoff’s secrets she realizes she has had to bear the unequal share of their responsibilities. The third fissure is within Kate, as she incrementally falls out of love with Geoff and decides to escape their marriage. Once a teacher, now Kate learns a new truth about her marriage. 

The breakup happens at their anniversary party, within the appearance of convivial celebration. Kate has expressed her desire to leave but urged him to go through with the party so others won’t sense their fissure. He vows to “start again” — in the usual way: buying her a little necklace, bringing her tea in bed, making her scrambled eggs, shaving for the event and making the obligatory speech off love and gratitude, ending in the obligatory — and predicted — tears. 

For most of the party Kate’s gallant conduct and smiles suggest she may have forgiven him and is willing to start anew. But as they take the floor to dance to The Platters’ Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,  her demeanour subtlety changes. As Geoff dances with increasing flash and flair she seems to sense an empty performance in him, which may also reflect back upon his speech. At one of his flourishes she snatches her hand away and steps back, signifying the end of their dance, probably of their marriage. The smoke has cleared from her eyes and she sees that his entire devotion to her has been based upon deception, his denial of his lost passion. 

She also realizes that she has put up with his falsity and inadequacy for too long. She has always covered for his social blunders, like calling a friend respectful of Thatcher a fascist. Kate has had to make all the accommodations to sustain their marriage while he did what he wanted and didn’t do what he didn’t want to do. It’s in her backstory. She married him at 20, when he was older and on the rebound from Katya. He had to campaign to win her, especially against her father’ disapproval. Having just lost her mother, she was vulnerable for a marriage that granted her duties rather than rights. Some marriages are like that. 

In their one sex scene he loses his erection but she dutifully consoles him. “That’s alright.” In the morning she tries to finish for herself, which she has always had to do even in non-sexual ways throughout a marriage that indulged the husband at the expense of the wife.

Several long shots show Kate as an isolated figure in the open landscape. But Geoff is always shot close-up and encased or framed. She is the open and expansive one, he the restrained and secretive. Hence his glasses, which hide his eyes, and his beard, which hides most of his face and which he removes only for the party, after he has been exposed. 

When Geoff describes his German he says the nouns are easy but the verbs are hard. He knows what things are but not what their relationships are, what the nouns, whether people or objects, do to each other or what happens between them. Relationships, the verbs, are the obedient wife’s preserve.  

Nor is Geoff entirely without our sympathy. He does love his wife and has acted as much as his understanding would allow in her interests. When he decides not to go to Switzerland he seems finally to have come to terms with the secret he left partially buried for the 45 years. We can believe he is grateful for Kate and wants to continue their marriage. 

There have probably not been this year two film performances as subtle and powerful as the two leads here. Had Rampling been allowed a vehement eruption she’d be a lock on the Oscar. But this film is all subtlety, her experience all interior, and her eruption no louder then stepping out of the Platters’ dance. The film’s stage or arena is clearly Kate, so we often get long closeups of her quiet, nuanced responses while Geoff speaks. Rampling’s inflections are astonishing. If this were a novel, her fleeting glance at the ukulele player would by itself warrant five pages of description.
     This film is a privilege.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

  With its 39-episode fragmented structure and its absolutely unmoving camera, this Swedish film is a sweeping still life survey of modern daily life, like the Peter Breughel the Elder painting of hunters from which the title is drawn.The film is as ascetic in its monotones and monochromes as in its static camera. 

Writer/director Roy Andersson’s title may have an additional reference: “En duva…” echoes the hilarious short 1968 parody that George Coe and Anthony Lover did of Ingmar Bergman’s themes and aesthetics during his early prime. The new film’s primary theme is the miseries of life, a hardy Bergman concern played more deadpan than anguished here. 

Andersson’s spirit is playful and parodic. Several characters on the phone tell the people they’re chatting with “I’m glad to hear everything is fine with you.” But we see no joy on screen, except for the laughing diners in the restaurant that only emphasizes the unfortunate lonely army man’s misery outside. 

Indeed the first fragment, the first of three Visits from Death, is a happy domestic scene in which, while the wife prepares dinner, humming in tune with the soundtrack, the husband tries to uncork a wine bottle and dies of a heart attack. 

The film eschews sentimentality. In the second episode three adults try to wrestle the treasure-trove handbag out of their dying mother’s croaking grasp. Later, a maudlin song will depress salesman Jonathan with the idea that he will see his parents again in heaven. And they were nice to him.

Jonathan and partner Sam are the two mainline figures. They try to “sell fun” but can’t get buyers, can’t get paid by the odd buyer they find, and therefore can’t pay their suppliers. The film is rife with such deadpan deadbeats. The “fun” these men are offering are bathetic novelties: vampire teeth, a laughter bag and an Uncle One Tooth mask. 

In fact, bathos rules. Parodies abound, as in the several versions of Battle Hymn of the Republic. In the last episode, people waiting at a bus stop, a man stopping to refill his bike tires, another puzzled to learn that it’s Wednesday, not Thursday, our daily lives are defined as trivial antitheses to heroism and meaning. 

As this man doesn’t know where he is in the week, the film admits two historical intrusions, i.e., where are we in the larger movements of time? Both expand the characters’ misery and emptiness to the larger state. Sweden is confronted with Jonathan’s late-night philosophizing: “Is it right to use someone else just for your purpose?”

In the first King Charles XII rides into a contemporary bar, leading his troops into valiant battle. Later he returns beaten, battered, broken by “the sly Russian” who apparently armed themselves without notice. The king has to wait for someone using the bar toilet. The women in the bar wail at having been widowed.

The second historical episode has a colonial troop herd chained and shackled black citizens, including women and children, into a huge copper drum, which as it rotates over a pool of burning oil kills them. This may be the dream Jonathan immediately reports, but it is still an allusion to a historic misdeed. The cylinder bears the name Boliden, the company whose sale of smelting to Chile in the 1980s led to charges that hundreds of citizens, including children, were poisoned by the waste site. 

     As the film moves away from its first three death scenes, its overall movement might be defined as our denial of mortality. Those “fun” products are a bathetic summary of the diversions we seek in life to avoid recognizing our mortal limits. Hence the deaf man drinking on his stupor, the limping barmaid who sells the penniless a shot for a kiss, and all the sad characters Jonathan and Sam meet in their pathetic attempt to sell them fun. In that light the film may also reflect upon its own nature and structure and existence, that is, reflect upon the Swedish commercial film industry which — like any other nation’s —provides empty anodynes to its sad citizens.

Enclave

Goran Radovanovic pulls Enclave toward an inexorably tragic conclusion but pulls back to find redemption. 

Three characters find redemption. The Serbian boy Nenad survives near-death — buried under the new church bell in a burning tower — to make a new life in the multicultural Belgrade. His father Milena comes in from the embittered alcoholic’s cold to help his son make that new life.  The vengeful Albanian shepherd Baskim finds a conscience just in time to save Nenad’s life.

If the isolated, fragile Christian church bell tower expresses the vulnerability of that ethnic minority in Kosovo, four years after the war, Baskim’s role as shepherd carries both Christian and poetic connotations. The shepherd is traditionally the figure of pastoral innocence and purity, but here the Serbs’ murder of his father has turned him to violent malevolence. He even thinks of killing the priest. The shepherd is also Jesus, of course, so Baskim and the church bell frame the climax in Christian terms. 

The film details the tensions between the Albanian community and the small Serbian enclave that barely survives in the antagonistic ethos. Armoured tanks convey the citizens between the two zones’ borders. The boys are raised into their fathers’ war, until Nenad’s hunger for friendship — any friendship, even with the Albanian toughs — draws him into the Albanian “society” and Baskim discovers the error of his anger.

Writer/director Radovanovic himself plays the Serb who joins the Albanian multi-ethnic police force, placing the larger peace-keeping role ahead if his ethnic identity. His conversion is not guilt-free. By assuming the role the director emphasizes the importance of this character: subordinating ethnic commitment to the larger community and peace. That compromise Milena spurns on principle. But the ethic of the film promotes the suspension of ethnic wars in favour of rediscovering our common brotherhood. Hence the Christian framework.

     The happy ending is not a sell-out. Rather, it points a way out of the self-perpetuating rage and murders that poison and destroy the idealists in any civil war. This story of redemption is more constructive than the tragic conclusion would have been.
     The grandfathers are dying or unchangeable, the fathers are disillusioned and impotent, so to the children fall the need and hopes for peace. The Albanian urchins start as guerrilla stone throwers but graduate into guns and at least the intention to murder. Friendship with the erstwhile enemy Nenad saves them. And if Nenad didn't have a best friend to write about at the beginning, at the end he has his ex-enemy.
     Hence the interweaving of the Serbian grandfather’s death and funeral with the Albanian’s supervision of his grandson’s wedding. The cycle of community trumps the cycle of violence.

Youth

The heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth lies in the lead composer Fred Ballinger’s (Michael Caine) most famous work, Simple Songs. The queen will knight him if he conducts that number in a concert for her Prince Phillip. Ballinger refuses because he wrote it for his famous soprano wife Melanie to perform and she’s gone. Not dead, we eventually learn, but frozen into a silent scream.

Ballinger is embarrassed by his fame for that simple composition, instead of all his weightier works. Sinilarly, serious actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) is regretfully best known for his heavily costumed role as a robot in some special effects trivia. By disappearing into the robot he disappeared his serious work. 

The film is woven out of such paradoxes. That is, it’s a stab at capturing our complex reality of life. Like Ballinger’s signature piece, the film is a simple story — a mixed bag of folks at holiday and rehab at a luxurious hotel/spa in Wiesel (i.e., “pointed”) in the Swiss Alps. But everything simple is complex. 

Ballinger feels that he can only relate to music and admits to having neglected his wife and daughter Lena. “You were right. Music is all I understand.” But he remembers his tremors when he fell into love at first sight of Melanie. His current detachment expresses his pain rather than the apparent lack of feeling. 

His buddy film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) is scripting his testament film but with his screenwriters is bogged down on the ending. In his Eureka moment he will allot the deathbed speech to the dying man’s wife, not him. But the film dies when that actress Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda) pulls out of the project, their 12th together over 53 years. She first explains she needs the money from a TV series she needs to prefer. But she goes on to declare his career dead, his last films crap, in a cruel candour all offered — of course — in the name of friendship. Love and hate bubble together there.

In a chillingly expressive shot, on the left side of the otherwise black screen Fonda’s old, veined hand talon-like caresses the side of Keitel's cheek. That’s Jane Fonda’s hand!?! The film is titled Youth but, paradoxically again, it’s about the old, the sere not the juicy. But here youth and age are the same telescope. Through one end it’s youth looking at the future in closeup. Through the other it’s the past, galloping further and further away.

With Pamela’s withdrawal, Boyle knows his project is dead but determines to start another. In his last scene with Ballinger he says “You say that emotions are overrated. But that's bullshit. Emotions are all we've got.” On that he strides out to the balcony and jumps to his death. Shattered in guilt, Pamela runs amok in the airplane and has to be bloodily subdued. With his gesture Boyle refuted Pamela’s disrespect: “C'mon, life goes on even without that cinema bullshit.” Another “simple song” here — bitterly comic but sombre.

Sorrentino gives the film’s last shot to the dead but beaming Boyle. That is, he gives the last silent word to Boyle’s faith in emotion. When Ballinger conducts his simple masterpiece for the queen he tears up over its emotional force. Against Melanie’s silent scream Ballinger proffers his musical articulation of his ardor. It speaks for as well as to everyone. As in the film’s last “simple song,” over the end titles, he’s fully content and out of control. 

So the composition that seems simple but beautiful turns out resonant and profound, especially in full orchestration. That’s the funny thing about life: the simple is so complex. Conversely, as the young girl compliments Tree about one off his serious films, he taught her that the big things in life are essentially simple. Everybody doesn’t have a clue what they’re about — so it doesn’t matter. As Ballinger early told Boyle, “Levity is also perverse.” Not here. Here the light is how we handle the heavy.

Hence too the tension between the intellect and the senses. The young masseuse speaks of the understanding that only touch can give. Ballinger is proud he never became an intellectual. The screenwriter scenes are a parody of literary creation. On the other hand, the sensually rich Miss Universe reveals an astonishing intelligence, dissolving that antithesis.  
     When Boyle hires the plain looking young hooker just to walk with him, he seems to be buying an emotion not a sensation. When we see the girl’s mother seeing her off to her “job,” Sorrentino seems to encapsulate the tradition of modern Italian cinema (as embodied by Fellini). The girl carries the neorealist exploration of poverty into the contemporary spa’s opulence.  

  Another moment of historical resonance involves Tree, who is at the spa studying the people for clues to his next role. We finally learn his role when he appears in costume, freezing all the white-clad diners — as Hitler. Tree pulls out of his project because “I have to choose what is really worth telling: horror or desire? And I choose desire. You, each one of you, you open my eyes, you made me see that I should not be wasting my time on the senseless fear….” Mutatis mutandis, that could be Pamela’s reason too.  As desire trumps horror both Boyle and Ballinger nurse charged memories of a childhood attraction to the same girl, unconsummated so ever fresh in their mind.

In several scenes the visitors are shot underwater, or part in, part out, whether in exuberant motion or in synchronized therapy. The film’s title image has “Youth” in the top half of a horizontal split image, lighter than age, unburdened by the subconscious of bubbling memories and experience, free to float (like Miss Universe nude in the pool). The imagery connotes the subconscious’s rise against the conscious.
     Hence the film’s abundant surrealism. Ballinger conducts a symphony of cows, cowbells and birds. A woman in the elevator slips in and out of a mask. Figures are isolated against vast expanses. A boy looms up on a bicycle ridden as if one wheel. Lena dreams her rival’s music video run amok. Boyle sees a field teeming with his films’ heroines, like restless spirits carrying his torments. Surrealism is another of those resonant “simple songs”  — simple in their random associations, complex in how they’re unpacked. Like youth, age and Youth.

The Big Short

I can’t think of another film like The Big Short. It explains the economic meltdown of 2008 with a rage at the fraudulent banking system and the government that coddles it. But this — in effect — lecture is presented as a satiric montage of cultural references woven through the stories of the five principals who bet on the mortgage bubble collapsing and taking the economy down with it. They bet their success on the economy’s failure. 

The five lead figures are variously outsiders who see past the industry’s smugness and are disturbed by the banks’ corruption and irresponsibility. Each has his own quirks and offbeat temperament — because only they can strike an outside perspective on the system. 

Paradoxically, the first to see through that system is the one-eyed maverick, Michael Burry, an MD turned investment broker. We’re not told what kind of doctor he is, but to through Wall Street like that he must be a proctologist. In the kingdom of the willfully blind the one-eyed man is king. 

In contrast, the Standard and Poor exec who reluctantly admits the bond ratings are sham wears dark wraparound shades, that express her inscrutability and compromised vision. 

At least three — Burry, Mark Baum and Ben Rickert — are idealists, with an earnest desire to see justice served on the corrupt banks.  Charlie Geller and Jaimie Shipley are spirited young hustlers itching to crack the closed game. 

Our interest in the five engaging men gives this economics lesson a real hook. The human drama brings the financial story to life. Adding to the film’s humour and wild spirit, director Adam McKay tosses in comic inserts. In a bubble bath a sexy champagne-sipping blonde explains one matter of high finance, a famous chef another.
     To distance itself from its corrupt characters, sometimes a character admits to the camera that a scene didn’t really happen the way it’s being played. Sometimes for emphasis he tells us that an outrageous scene actually happened that way. This reminds us we’re watching a story more truthful than the usual “based on…” fictionalization. This is our financial system and government at “work.”

The montage of shots from the media, from a tent city, from activities across the American social spectrum, make a key point about this bursting of the mortgage bubble. The drama didn’t happen in isolation, however detached the moneymen may be. As the retired Rickert reminds his two celebrating colleagues, the social collapse inherent in the short-sellers’ success means thousands will lose their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their futures, their families and lives. The mortgage bubble didn’t happen in a bubble but with wide-ranging and real, tragic consequences for thousands of innocents. The cultural references remind us that the cut-throat capitalism we see here is not a freakish exception but indeed an essential element of the capitalist culture.  

Indeed the film packages the dense information and historic reconstruction as a very human story, primarily through our engagement with the characters, but also through the comic play in the additional material. The sombre subject matter closes with the ominous warning that the same corrupt practice continues, with no reform to the economic system and virtually no punishment for the fraudulent bankers whose greed almost destroyed the world economy. But the human stories, the jokes, the rich vein of visual material, make this tragedy feel almost comic. The film doesn’t change the economic fraud or end the greed, but it makes the hard lesson not just palatable but a pleasure. 

Perhaps the film’s key justification is the quote from Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.“ Now we know how wrong our trust was in our economic system, in our banks and our brokers, and in the government that’s supposed to place the common weal ahead of its rich friends’. 

     From novelist Haruki Murakami comes the climactic resignation: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” Bernie Sanders must love this film.

Carol

In the vote between convention and passion the eyes have it. Carol and Therese both express profound yearning and strength in their looks at each other. 

Therese in her innocence is wide-eyed, Carol powerful, drawn back and appraising. That difference catches the predatory element in Carol’s love and Therese’s various disadvantages in experience and power. 

In contrast to the two women’s emotional looks, a slammed door window frames husband Harge’s angry, violent eye. He has isolated himself, framed himself out of his wife’s emotions and in refusing to let her go imprisoned himself. 

Until Harge threatens to sue for sole custody of their daughter, Carol is confident, wealthy, assured. She dresses elegantly, in expensive style, asserting her blondness even in the fur she flaunts, against the more conventional dark mink of the era. Young Therese dresses trimly, in neat plaids and restrained colours and lines, except for the flourish of her bold,  ballooning tam, which anticipates the courage in her unconventional sexuality. The assigned Santa hat is a brief diminishment which wins her Carol’s first encouragement. By the way, in her gamin look Rooney Mara's Therese recalls Audrey Hepburn in The Children's Hour (1961), which restored playwright Lillian Hellman's original lesbian theme, discreetly changed to a heater premarital affair in the original adaptation, These Three(1936).

As in Far From Heaven Todd Haynes uses a 1950s setting, plot line, and characterization to address a  contemporary tension. Carol has the perfect ‘50s heroine response to life: “Just when it can’t get any worse, you run out of cigarettes.” But all the characters are frozen in the ‘50s confusion between love and desire and all live under the shadow of male-centered sexuality. 

The period setting reminds us that we’re still not entirely free from considering same-sex love a moral issue. Gay lovers have an easier time today but there remains a stubborn prejudice against following one’s heart “against the grain” of social convention.

When Carol accedes to Harge's custody demand she admits two motives. The primary is to give their daughter the best possible life, to minimize her damage by her parents’ conflict. But equally important, she can’t “go against the grain” of her own nature, neither as a mother nor as a sexual being.

That theme raises the film beyond “love story” and certainly beyond “a lesbian love story.” Love, after all, is a nebulous concept. Therese can’t get boyfriend Richard to explain what it is. It’s what he says makes her attraction to him different from the two women he’s already had sex with. (Did i mention that the film is set in the ‘50s?) 

Even when Carol tells Therese she loves her what do we know? Or they? Not much beyond the attraction they immediately had for each other — again, registered in their locked eyes across the enchanted department store. As Carol’s lifelong friend and ex-lover Abby notes, the passion erupts and then “things change.” The ardor once faded, what relationship survives? Confirming the ephemerality of ardor, Therese spots Richard dancing with his new girlfriend at the party.

The film’s main theme then is not lesbian love or even love in general but the related question: how can we determine what we want. As Therese admits, “I don't know what I want. How could I know what I want if I say yes to everything?” 

Of course always saying No is as restrictive as always saying Yes. When she recoils from the Times reporter, Therese says she doesn’t mind his premature kiss but clearly has to leave. From the yes she moves to her first tentative ‘no.’ Two exceptions result from Carol’s influence. The first is when Therese doesn’t wait to say Yes but takes the initiative to advance their relationship from friends to lovers. The second is when the “blossomed” Therese says no to Carol’s invitation to move into her new Manhattan flat. Otherwise Therese doesn’t know what she wants or needs and just goes with the drift. 

Finally Therese manages a yes and a no combined. When she declines another lesbian’s advance at the Village party she accepts her true nature and leaves to say yes to Carol. This time when they lock glances, Carol — at home amid her social and class peers — still finds another level of satisfaction when she sees Therese has returned. But it’s the ‘50s. She can only smile back.

     Both need what the other provides, including a rare intimacy. On the phone after their first break Therese says  “I wanna ask you things, but I’m… I’m not sure that you want that.” Carol, crying, says “Ask me things… Please.” For all her experience and power, Carol needs to be asked because she craves intimacy. She learns from Therese how to determine what she wants by determining, issue by issue, when to say yes and when no.

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.