Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence stars in the upcoming Joy, a semi-fictionalized biopic about real-life entrepreneur Joy Mangano: the President of Ingenious Designs, LLC, who was responsible for creating such best-selling household items as the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangers. However, the film begins when Joy (Lawrence) is but a young woman with big dreams of both becoming a successful business woman and starting a family – one much healthier than the broken (and dysfunctional) household that she grew up in.
Joy’s dreams prove much easier imagined than accomplished, as both the movie’s teaser trailer and its newly-released full length trailer (see above) make clear. The film marks Lawrence’s third collaboration with her Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle writer/director David O. Russell – and the newest preview suggests it could be the pair’s most purely dramatic movie together, too.
Russell’s previous films with Lawrence have frequently blended raw emotional drama with darkly quirky comedy, and to a degree that looks to also hold true for Joy – seeing as the latest trailer is not without its moments of levity, either, largely courtesy of Robert De Niro (playing Joy’s blue collar father, Rudy). Nonetheless, both the trailer footage and the official Joy synopsis – summarizing Joy’s tale as a story of “betrayal, treachery, the loss of innocence and the scars of love” – may fall closer tonally to the serious parts of Silver Linings Playbook‘s take on the rom-com/screwball comedy or American Hustle‘s version of the con artist sub-genre.
Similarly, while Lawrence, De Niro, and Joy costar Bradley Cooper have worked together with Russell before, the rest of Joy‘s cast is composed of actors who’ve not yet collaborated with the director. Those talented “newcomers” to the Russell school of filmmaking – which includes Édgar Ramirez (Deliver Us from Evil), Dascha Polanco (Orange is the New Black), Virginia Madsen (Sideways), Isabella Rossellini (Enemy), and Elisabeth Röhm (The Client List) – should help to better distinguish this film from Russell and Co.’s previous ventures together.
Russell has not been one for “historical accuracy” in his previous movies – something he poked fun at with American Hustle (based on the true story of the ABSCAM operation) by opening on a title card reading “Some of this actually happened.” That will also remain the case with Joy, as Rusell reportedly made his script’s version of Joy Mangano into a compilation of several real-life female entrepreneurs, whereas the original screenplay draft by Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids) provided a more factual account of how Joy made a name for herself.
Will those changes to Joy Mangano’s real-life story be for the better or worse in Russell’s film? Well, as we’ve discussed in the past, striving for historical accuracy while at the same time offering a solid film narrative can be a tricky act for anyone to pull off. However, the marketing for Joy hasn’t played up the idea that the movie is “a true story” and Russell’s actual film isn’t likely to either – meaning, Joy might not attract the widespread complaints about inaccuracy like so many Hollywood biopics often do (for a recent example of this, see Steve Jobs).
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Joy opens in U.S. theaters on December 25th, 2015.
