With my expectations in floor minus 25 after knowing that the film I was going to watch was about the invention of something called "miracle mop", a few days ago I got into a movie theatre in Piccadilly Circus ready to watch Joy (David O. Russell, 2015).
Just to give you a little more context, Joy is the story of the inventor Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), who managed to set up a commercial empire in spite of having to take care of ex-husbands, parents, children and in general being a single mom in the USA of the 70s.
The mop thing might not sound very engaging, but we also have Robert De Niro, Virgina Madsen and Elisabeth Röhm portraying the insufferable family of Joy, Dascha Polanco as her best friend, Édgar Ramírez playing the immature husband role and Isabella Rossellini and Bradley Cooper in roles that I won't explain in case that is too much information; so even ignoring Jeniffer Lawrence -who is on her own a reason to get into a movie theatre-, the performances and characters are pretty amazing. In particular Ramírez and Rossellini are really funny, and the whole film makes you smile often and even laugh out loud every now and then, especially during the first part.
Setting aside that the story is cheerful and entertaining most of the time, -the situation is stressful and quite dramatic, but it is shown from a fun and witty point of view-, the quest this woman had to go through for the world to accept that her ideas were actually smart and so to be able to escape her miserable and indebted life is, indeed, worth making a movie about; because here Mrs. Mangano had to put up with so many thieves, con artists and people trying to convince her that her ideas were worthless, that it is kind of difficult not to worship her a little after knowing about her life. Actually, the real Joy Mangano is still there, loaded and selling this furry things called "huggable hangers".
If we ignore the excessive amount of songs used in the soundtrack and certain scenes slightly overacted, Joy is an almost impeccable drama that provides with good characters, good performances, a great story to tell and that I have found, in general, very recommendable. If I used one of those rating systems I would give it a ton of stars.
Remember, though, that the original mop was invented by this guy from Logroño. The more you know.
