JOY (US - 2015) Written and directed by David O. Russell. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini, Dascha Polanco, Elisabeth Rohm, Ken Howard, Susan Lucci, Donna Mills, Laura Wright, Maurice Benard, John Enos, Alexander Cook, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Melissa Rivers. (PG-13, 124 mins)
With JOY, a loose biopic of inventor, entrepreneur, and HSN personality Joy Mangano, writer/director David O. Russell has started to coast on formulaic tropes that stretch back to 2010's THE FIGHTER and 2012's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Like those two justifiably acclaimed films, JOY has a down-and-out protagonist trying to scrape by while being helped but more often hindered by an ostensibly well-meaning but absurdly dysfunctional family. We had Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) in THE FIGHTER, struggling to succeed in the ring while dealing with a crackhead brother (Christian Bale), a pushy mother (Melissa Leo), and a small army of almost comically unpleasant sisters, and Pat Solitano, Jr.(Bradley Cooper) in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, struggling to come out on top with his bipolar disorder while falling for a bitter young widow (Jennifer Lawrence) and dealing with his wacky friends and family, headed by his superstitious, Philadelphia Eagles-obsessed dad (Robert De Niro). Lawrence, De Niro and Cooper all star in JOY (all also appeared in Russell's 2013 Scorsese homage AMERICAN HUSTLE), and Lawrence's title character is largely cut from the same cloth as Micky Ward and Pat Solitano.
Once-promising high-school valedictorian Joy is an airport ticket clerk and divorced mother of two struggling to support everyone in her family: kindly, encouraging grandmother MiMi (Diane Ladd), her soap opera-addicted, shut-in mother Terry (Virginia Madsen), and even her ex-husband Anthony (Edgar Ramirez), who still lives in the basement. She also has to periodically take in her dad Rudy (De Niro), when he's in between girlfriends, and puts up with older, bitter half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm)--Rudy's daughter by his first wife--who constantly bad-mouths Joy to her own children. Fed up with none of her dreams coming to fruition and everyone's dependence on her, Joy long ago abandoned her gift of creativity when real life set in. After mopping up a spill and cutting herself on broken glass while hand-wringing the mop, Joy is inspired to create a single-looped thread, self-wringing mop and gets investment backing from Rudy's newest lady friend, wealthy widow Trudy (Isabella Rossellini). Eventually, Joy gets a meeting with QVC exec Neil Walker (Cooper) and after a couple of stumbles that lead to Joy going on the air herself to sell it, the "Miracle Mop" becomes a huge hit, but Joy is unprepared for the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world of commerce. 95% of the film is Joy's struggle with little regard to the time frame, then it ends with a five-minute wrap-up where years have gone by and she's suddenly a huge business mogul with inventors coming to make product deals with her as if she's Vito Corleone doling out favors on his daughter's wedding day.
At face value, JOY can be seen as an uplifting tale of determination and can-do spirit as the underdog achieves the American Dream and overcomes the obstacles to become a self-made success. But the story is so predictable and the characters surrounding Joy such unlikable and quirky cartoons that it never rings true. Russell seems to vacillate between lighthearted Coen Bros. and less-precious Wes Anderson throughout. Russell isn't as interested in production design as Anderson, but character-wise, it fits that mold. It's often like THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS restaged as a blue-collar HUDSUCKER PROXY. JOY is almost defeated by a bungled opening half-hour that jumps all over the place and never gets the groundwork and exposition effectively conveyed (it's telling that there's four credited editors). We're shown Joy's family as the train wreck they are and get little sense of what brought them to this place of almost outrageous self-delusion. Anthony is constantly regarded as a lazy, deadbeat fuck-up by the family, but he ends up being Joy's rock while everyone else except the loving MiMi--even the allegedly business-savvy Trudy, who insists they don't need a patent attorney--gives Joy terrible advice and almost actively thwarts her progress. Scenes sometimes end in the middle of sentences--possibly an ill-advised stylistic choice--and there's huge gaps in the story that are simply left hanging: does Joy ever quit her airport job? We see her being told she's getting moved to the night shift, then her job is never mentioned again. Why is Peggy such a bitch to Joy? Why do we see so much of Joy's daughter but never even get a clear look at her son's face? Joy Mangano (her last name is never mentioned onscreen) has patented over 100 inventions but we only hear of two: the Miracle Mop and the Huggable Hanger.
Russell has directed Lawrence, Christian Bale, and Melissa Leo to Oscars (along with nominations for Cooper, De Niro, Jacki Weaver, and Amy Adams), with second nominations after the win for Lawrence and Bale. He's certainly an actor's director and JOY intermittently works in fits and starts thanks to its cast: 25-year-old Lawrence is miscast and a decade too young to play someone who quit college 17 years earlier to take charge of the family after her parents' divorce (Mangano was already in her mid-30s when she invented the Miracle Mop), but manages to get by on her energy and screen presence. De Niro has a couple of good De Niro moments (he's really funny in the flashback to Joy and Anthony's wedding, and when he unloads on Terry with "You're like a gas leak--we can't see you, we can't smell you, but you're silently killing all of us!"), Cooper only has a few scenes, but his tour of the QVC operation with Joy is probably Russell's most inspired sequence in the film, and Ladd provides some much-needed warmth and humanity as the loving MiMi. Ramirez is alright but isn't given much to do but stand around, but almost everyone else--Madsen with her gaudy, unsightly eyewear, Rohm constantly glowering and seething, Rossellini's inconsistent shifting from kindly widow to ruthless shark--is stuck playing unplayable characters. Madsen comes off the worst by far, with her pathetic helplessness and her addiction to a terrible daytime soap--featuring characters played by soap vets Susan Lucci, Donna Mills, and John Enos, among others--getting entirely too much screen time (it seems like it'll function as a Greek chorus of sorts, but with Lucci, Mills, and the others giving intentionally terrible line readings, it ultimately plays as a cheap, lazy recurring gag that doesn't really belong in this movie). Madsen's Terry also gets a love interest in Haitian plumber Toussaint (Jimmy Jean-Louis) in a quickly abandoned subplot that never seems plausible and goes nowhere fast. There's probably a very good movie hiding somewhere in the middling misfire JOY ends up being. It feels like Russell is half-assing it, banking on the track record of the proven Lawrence/Cooper/De Niro magic to carry the weight and compensate for the cut corners and shortcomings of a script that maybe needed another polish or two before it was ready to roll.
Writer/director David O. Russell has been on a hot streak with THE FIGHTER (2010), SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012), and AMERICAN HUSTLE (2013), and that's probably what finally got his long-shelved NAILED released as ACCIDENTAL LOVE. NAILED was shot in South Carolina during the summer of 2008 and co-written by, among others, Russell and former Vice Presidential daughter Kristin Gore, based on Gore's 2004 novel Sammy's Hill. The film's primary backer was the financially-strapped Capitol Films, who ran out of money on this and several other films shot at the same time, including Taylor Hackford's LOVE RANCH (ultimately released in 2010) and AMERICAN HISTORY X director Tony Kaye's BLACK WATER TRANSIT (still unreleased). NAILED shut down production on at least eight occasions over that tumultuous summer, despite an initial budget alleged to be in the area of $25 million. One shutdown was caused when the crew revolted over not being paid, and another occurred when stars Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal followed suit and walked off the set over similar money issues. Production was halted permanently by the end of 2008 with all of the post-work still needing to be done and at least one major scene--one that all parties agreed was completely essential--still unfilmed. By early 2010, Russell ran out of patience and washed his hands of it. He publicly distanced himself from NAILED, moved on to THE FIGHTER, and never looked back. In 2013, co-producer Kia Jam corralled enough funds to cobble as much of the missing scene together as possible and complete post-production, but Russell wanted no part of it. Now carrying the generic title ACCIDENTAL LOVE, the film was acquired by Millennium and given a VOD dumping in February 2015, with the non-existent "Stephen Greene" shouldering the blame after Russell successfully petitioned to have his name removed as both director and co-writer.
It's hardly praise, but as far as abandoned clusterfucks go, ACCIDENTAL LOVE isn't as bad as Alec Baldwin's doomed directorial debut THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, shot in 2001 and ultimately aired on Starz in 2007 as SHORTCUT TO HAPPINESS, with director credit going to one "Harry Kirkpatrick." Biel stars as Alice, a small-town Indiana roller-skating carhop who gets shot in the head with a nail gun at a restaurant just after her cop boyfriend Scott (James Marsden) proposes. Uninsured Alice can't afford the brain surgery required to extract the nail, and it's deemed a pre-existing condition when she tries to get on Scott's insurance. Concerned about future medical issues, Scott bails and Alice goes to Washington to meet with her district representative, freshman Congressional newbie Howard Birdwell (a mannered, bug-eyed Gyllenhaal), to bring attention to her plight and plead the case for health care reform. Birdwell is a nebbishy type with great political ambition but he's kept under the thumb of lobbyists and powerful Rep. Pam Hendrickson (Catherine Keener, cast radically against type as a cold, brittle bitch-on-wheels), a former astronaut whose primary goal is getting the government to fund a military base on the moon. ACCIDENTAL LOVE vacillates between screwball comedy, with Alice's condition frequently causing spontaneous outbursts, speaking in a foreign language, or demonstrating insatiable lust, and political satire, which comes across as forced and rather toothless. It shouldn't come as a surprise or edgy insight to see that politicians are frequently corrupt, self-serving, and beholden to special interest groups.
"Stephen Greene"'s ACCIDENTAL LOVE obviously isn't as polished as David O. Russell's NAILED would've been, but what's here is almost all Russell's work, and it wouldn't have been his finest hour any way you cut it. There's some amusing bits here and there, and Kurt Fuller does a nice job as a priest with Viagra issues, but the more it goes on, the more shrill and heavy-handed it becomes. It's the kind of movie that ends with the whole cast gathered for a feelgood dance number, with the added bonus of closing credits bloopers, as if anyone had a good time making this thing (given the chaotic production, wouldn't footage of the Capitol money men telling a pissed-off crew they aren't being paid make for a much more entertaining blooper reel?). Other familiar faces lost in the quagmire include James Brolin as the Speaker of the House (a last-minute replacement when James Caan quit over "script disagreements," probably the film's liberal bent being at odds with the far-right Caan's politics); Tracy Morgan as Alice's friend Keyshawn, but he's essentially playing himself; Paul Reubens as Hendrickson's aide; Bill Hader as the snide ER doc who shuts down the surgery and grabs a burger when he's told Alice is uninsured; Beverly D'Angelo as Alice's mom (D'Angelo, in what must've been a frustrating summer in 2008, was also in BLACK WATER TRANSIT); and Kirstie Alley (her name misspelled "Kirstey" in the closing credits) as Alice's aunt. Perhaps NAILED could've been a sharp and prescient satire on pre-Obamacare politics, but ACCIDENTAL LOVE is a dated misfire best forgotten by all concerned. (PG-13, 101 mins)
EVERLY (US - 2015)
The idea of Salma Hayek spending an entire movie slicing, dicing, and blowing away a crew of yakuza goons in an apartment building sounds a lot more fun than EVERLY turns out to be. A reverse RAID of sorts, EVERLY has Hayek as the title heroine, a prostitute holed up on the sixth floor of a yakuza-owned slum where other women are pimped out to wealthy Japanese clients and other assorted perverts and sadists. Everly has secretly been working with the cops to bring down crime boss Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe), who owns the building and the women who live in it. Taiko knows what she's been up to and has a price on Everly's head as other prostitutes, Taiko flunkies, and her neighbors try to get into Everly's apartment and take her out while she frantically tries to reunite with her estranged mother (Laura Cepeda) and young daughter (Aisha Ayamah). Director Joe Lynch (CHILLERAMA, KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM) manages to pull off a couple of fairly well-executed sequences involving long tracking shots and uninterrupted takes, but for the most part, EVERLY just never finds its groove and feels significantly longer than 90 minutes. When it was screened at the 2014 Fantastic Fest in Austin, it got an overwhelmingly positive reaction from participation medal-awarding scenesters who no doubt have Lynch among their Facebook friends, but what's here is in many ways reminiscent of Alexandre Aja's atrocious PIRANHA remake, another lazy grindhouse poseur of an exploitation flick that thinks showing up and making the references are good enough. There's a lot of Takashi Miike in the over-the-top bloodshed and a bit of Tarantino, not just in the adoring shots of Hayek's feet as Everly constantly goes from high heels to barefoot, but also in one Japanese john (Akie Kotabe) spending his entire screen time bleeding out from a gunshot wound on Everly's couch, just like Tim Roth in RESERVOIR DOGS right down to his wardrobe. As she demonstrated 20 years ago in DESPERADO (has it been that long?), Hayek, still stunning at 48, is more than game as a kick-ass action heroine, but EVERLY just isn't up to her level. It's an endless fanboy circle jerk that exists in an insulated, prefab cult movie echo chamber. Hayek could use a hit, and in better hands, EVERLY could've easily been her JOHN WICK. Instead, it's her HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN and nobody needs that. (R, 92 mins)
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (US - 2014)
There's a strong early-Jim Jarmusch vibe to this hypnotic vampire film from writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour, perhaps the most inventive of its kind since LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. Co-produced by Elijah Wood and shot in black & white in and around Bakersfield, CA, GIRL is set in the fictional Bad City, Iran and is in Persian with English subtitles. Amirpour and cinematographer Lyle Vincent do a tremendously effective job with the widescreen framing and using things like smokestacks and pumpjacks to present Bad City as a depressing industrial wasteland where drugs and crime rule above all. Nice-guy Arash (Arash Marandi) is forced into settling the debts of his junkie father Hossein (Marshall Manesh) to ruthless drug lord Saeed (Dominic Rains) when Saeed decides to take the only thing that matters to Arash--his pristine '57 T-Bird--as repayment. Saeed is soon slaughtered by a strange, silent woman (Sheila Vand) who turns out to be a vampire. The remarkably expressive, sad-eyed Vand is one of the most memorable vampires to hit the screens in some time. Portraying The Girl as one those melancholy sorts doomed to a life of loneliness, Vand doesn't even utter a word until nearly 40 minutes in, and almost like a holdover from the silent era, lets her face do much of her acting. When she tells prostitute Atti (Mozhan Marno) "You're sad, you don't remember wanting, and nothing ever changes," she's really talking about herself. GIRL is largely a triumph of style over substance, but there are numerous parallels and dualities at work throughout, like flip sides of a coin--between The Girl and Atti, Arash and Saeed, and The Girl and Hossein, perhaps the biggest monster of all when he shoots Atti full of heroin and prompts The Girl to take on the role of avenger. The Girl longs for love and humanity--watch the small, subtle smile she allows herself in really great scene the first time she's alone with Arash and plays White Lies' "Death"--in a world where empathy and feeling simply have no place with the likes of Saeed and Hossein around. A fascinating thematic companion piece to Jarmusch's recent ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT has its tedious bits that scream "art house pretension," especially with a long scene of Reza Sixo Safai's Rockabilly dancing with a balloon, but overall, it's a unique and visually arresting addition to vampire cinema. (Unrated, 101 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
Directed by David O. Russell. Written by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell. Cast: Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Pena, Shea Whigham, Alessandro Nivola, Elisabeth Rohm, Paul Herman, Colleen Camp, Anthony Zerbe, Barry Primus, Said Taghmaoui. (R, 138 mins)
In his "fictionalized" chronicle of the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal, director David O. Russell wears his love of Martin Scorsese on his sleeve, shooting much of the film in that same propulsive, electrifying style that's made GOODFELLAS one of the great American movies. Imitating Scorsese is nothing new, but the trick is to not let the hero worship trump everything else. Paul Thomas Anderson got that with BOOGIE NIGHTS and Russell accomplishes it here. Working with screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (who wrote Tom Tykwer's underrated THE INTERNATIONAL), Russell reassembles most of the main actors from his last two films (2010's THE FIGHTER and 2012's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK), changes the names of the principles involved in the scandal, and creates one of the most vividly compelling films of 2013: it's suspenseful, hilarious, brilliantly-acted, filled with rich characters, bad fashions and horrible hair, and mostly succeeds in capturing the period, except for one major gaffe where a character mentions reading Wayne Dyer's The Power of Intention, which wasn't published until 2004. Oops.
Sporting a gut and an unsightly combover, Christian Bale is Irving Rosenfeld, a small-timer who owns a dry-cleaning chain, mainly as a front for his con jobs, primarily in art forgery and the bilking of gullible investors. His partner-in-crime is Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who puts on a flawless British accent to pose as one Lady Edith Greensly, a supposed tangential member of the Royal Family. The pair met at a party years earlier and bonded over a shared love of Duke Ellington, with a romance blossoming even though Irving is married to the unstable, needy Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) and is a devoted father to their young son. Irving and Sydney fall into the web of ambitious FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who busts Sydney for embezzlement but offers both of them a way out if they agree to set up a sting involving Camden, NJ mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner, looking a lot like Steve Lawrence), a politician fiercely devoted to the people of his city and one who understands that palms need to be greased and under-the-table deals need to be made and if his corruption is for the greater good, then so be it. Along with a Hispanic FBI agent (Michael Pena) posing as a sheik, Richie, Irving, and "Lady Edith" try to get Polito to coordinate a business deal between some rich Arabs and an Atlantic City casino, which gets complicated when aging Florida mobster Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro) wants in on the action and tells them that the Sheik has to be a US citizen for any casino deal to happen. This leads to the increasingly edgy, reckless Richie and his bosses (Louis C.K., Alessandro Nivola) launching a larger operation to bust Tellegio, a top capo to Meyer Lansky, along with the bribing of several Congressmen under the guise of getting US citizenship for the Sheik. And if that wasn't enough, Rosalyn is enraged about her husband's involvement with Sydney and starts seeing one of Tellegio's underlings (Jack Huston) and, as is the norm with the manipulative Rosalyn, starts talking way too much about the things she knows and even more about the things she doesn't
Russell's use of music, narration, and long tracking shots are pure Scorsese, and the editing team of Alan Baumgarten, Jay Cassidy, and Crispin Struthers do a spot-on imitation of the rhythms and momentum established by Scorsese and his regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It doesn't have the continuity errors that plague even the undisputed Scorsese masterpieces (because he and Schoonmaker go for the takes that "feel" the best and he isn't overly concerned with continuity), but the film has the loose, improvisational feel of vintage Scorsese while also exhibiting the discipline and vision of the master filmmaker. In lesser hands, this could've turned into a pale imitation, but Russell very credibly brings it to life with a cast that's at the top of their game. Few of today's actors can disappear into a role like Bale (an Oscar-winner for THE FIGHTER), whose Irving has layers of humanity and a conscience beneath his dodgy, fast-talking exterior, and Cooper, who just a few years ago had "rom-com lightweight" written all over him, continues to show impressive range under the guidance of Russell, who directed him to an Oscar nomination in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Adams (nominated for THE FIGHTER), Renner, and Lawrence (a winner for SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK) are expectedly top-notch, as is De Niro in his one scene (he's both a Russell vet and the very embodiment of Scorsese's films), but another standout is C.K. as Richie's exasperated, bottom-line-watching direct supervisor, who gets a running gag about not finishing an ice-fishing story (also keep an eye out for Cooper's dead-on impression of C.K., which feels like an ad-libbed moment and it works beautifully). Though he doesn't go as far as to include Scorsese's favorite song, the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (and he mercifully excludes Blondie's "Heart of Glass," which is a seemingly mandatory inclusion for any film set in the late 1970s), Russell's song selection is impeccable: America's "A Horse With No Name," Chicago's "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" Steely Dan's "Dirty Work," Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," Tom Jones' "Delilah," ELO's "10538 Overture," and "Long Black Road," a new song from ELO leader Jeff Lynne, plus Lawrence shrieking Wings' "Live and Let Die" while cleaning the house in a blind rage. AMERICAN HUSTLE, which was conceived under the title AMERICAN BULLSHIT, is hypnotically, relentlessly fast-paced entertainment that hooks you in from the first grainy shot of the 1970s Columbia Pictures logo and never lets go. One of 2013's very best films.
