After a hot streak with ticket buyers, critics and Oscar voters, David O Russell was frozen out with Joy (Fox, 12). Applause was muted to inaudible, while only Jennifer Lawrence scored any awards recognition for a film built as a chattering shrine to her star power. Future audiences will, I hope, remember it as a film that deserved better. Built and buffed like a multistoreyed great American novel, yet with a surging, people-watching, restlessness best suited to the cinema, Joy is a messy marvel, perhaps the most prodigious child yet of the arranged marriage between Russell’s busy, eccentric storytelling style and classic Hollywood form.
A fictionalised biopic of Long Island-housewife-turned-Miracle-Mop -inventor Joy Mangano, it is no more about cleaning utensils than Giant is about oil. Mangano’s staggered rise to successful entrepreneurship is an American dream fable in the most robustly classical sense, albeit with a wry, rueful eye on personal and domestic demons, and a wary feminist credo – its heroine rails against the underestimation of men while turning it flintily to her advantage. Lawrence, as peppery and open hearted as she’s been since hitting the big time in Winter’s Bone (2010), cannily plays her as victim or vixen when required, though no player in this bristling ensemble, from a striding, steel-grinned Bradley Cooper to a leaf-tender Diane Ladd, is working in half measures. Plundering Robert Altman, Howard Hawks and daytime television alike, Russell conducts this suburban symphony with agitated adoration for all involved; not a modest film-maker by any stretch, he remains a thrillingly sociable one.
It’s a good week for brash, female-fronted entertainment. I’ll make no great formal claims for Sisters (Universal, 15), a kicky, women-behaving-badly vehicle for the irrepressible Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, but it’s snortingly funny throughout, which is surely Priority Number One in a film that hinges narratively on an overgrown house party, before more or less becoming one itself. There’s a hint of humanity to this story of unmoored siblings made to put away childish things, but the punchlines are what we’re here for. “We need a little less Forever 21 and a little more Suddenly 42,” Poehler groans. Shaggier but no less endearing a comic duo, Brits Alice Lowe and Dolly Wells delight as bumbling impostors at a rural poetry convention in Black Mountain Poets (Metrodome, 15). Jamie Adams’s energetically improvised farce seems thin in premise, only for its performers to keep uncovering fresh layers of embarrassment and affection. It might just be a miniature classic.
Documentary of the week is Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut (Dogwoof, 12), a lively, erudite account of the 1962 meeting of auteur minds that produced one of film studies’s most essential texts. Audio recordings of the directors’ original interviews are marbled with appreciations from a range of contemporary masters, from Olivier Assayas to Martin Scorsese. Those seeking penetrating criticism may be left dissatisfied, but it’s a nourishing love-in.
A strain of Hitchcock’s misanthropic gallows humour, in addition to at least one veiled Psycho reference, is present in Krampus (Universal, 15), a black-hearted Christmas-time creature horror that delivers its shocks with lip-licking aplomb. Nastily nifty as Michael Dougherty’s film is, spring hardly feels the time of year for it: wait eight months and crack open the anti-yule spirit then.
In January, Belgica –Belgian director Felix van Groeningen’s follow-up to wrenching, Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown – opened Sundance. That it’s already made its way to Netflix is indicative of the shrugging reviews it had, but this raucous, raw-nerved music drama merits a look anyway. Charting the rise, rise and fall of a grungy Ghent rock club founded by two sparring brothers, this rather predictably spiralling tale never lands the emotional left hook of van Groeningen’s break-out film, but compensates with pungent, sticky-floored atmosphere and raging sonics.
