Joy can’t wring enough out of Jennifer Lawrence

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The first 45 minutes or so of Joy, writer-director David O. Russell’s feature-length attempt to pass the Bechdel Test (A plus, not for nothing), taps into the self-assured giddiness of his previous couple of movies, using three of their key actors. But unlike the sparkling Silver Linings Playbook and its more panoramic but less focused follow-up, American Hustle, Joy abandons its predecessors’ warm, involving chaos to open instead a vein of chilly, syrupy machine oil. What starts as a Wes Andersonian fable — with visual and aural puns and overlapping dialogue and a curious, roaming POV — lurches toward static, humorless melodrama. It’s a puzzling, frustrating disappointment.

There’s no blaming Jennifer Lawrence, who won an Oscar for Playbook, juiced the biggest laughs in American Hustle and is as good here as she has ever been. As the title character, a broadly fairy-tale-ized version of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano — whose last name and other particulars go, as far as I remember, unuttered in Russell and Bridesmaids co-writer Annie Mumolo’s this-ain’t-all-true-so-don’t-sue-us story — she’s operating as a kind of acting-robot prototype, in keeping with the home-inventor gadgetiness of the plot. To wit: Starry-eyed but tough divorcée invents a mop out of household necessity (Lawrence plays determined), markets it to save her children from poverty (Lawrence plays mommy), is undercut by an evil stepsister and a cloddish father (Lawrence plays screwball), loses to patriarchy and criminality (Lawrence plays angry and sad), and gets in touch with her inner Mafia princess (Lawrence auditions for Scorsese). It’s a lot of acting, but she renders her character as close to seamless as Joy‘s increasingly frayed patchwork of themes and types allows.

Themes and types: Robert De Niro, bad dad (good work); Diane Ladd, sainted grandmother (lovely), voice-over narrator (uh oh); Virginia Madsen, bad mom, gentle sufferer of mild mental illness (best part of the movie); Elisabeth Rohm, Cinderella’s mean stepsisters as one passive-aggressive jerk (miscast); Isabella Rossellini, Old World heiress from some other story (from some other movie); Bradley Cooper, smooth operator (smoothly operating).

Plot: Design mop, make mop, try to sell mop, dip mop in tears, rinse, repeat. That’s it. Really.

Joy is a movie about a mop that keeps its user’s hands from getting dirty, made by a director who unexpectedly declines this time to get his hands dirty. With four credited editors, it’s not hard to believe that the rewrites and reshoots reported ahead of the movie’s release were no minor fixes. As the first half’s distinctive pleasures give way to an absurd, tone-deaf climax, then a condescending denouement, you long for a more authentic mess, something that test audiences or studio bosses didn’t demand be cleaned up.