Joy (2015)

Joy rounds out a kind of thematic trilogy for director David O. Russell, but it’s a trilogy unified more by a stable company of performers – chief among them Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro, with a few other bit players recurring in the mix. Of these, preceded by Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Joy is perhaps the least successful of the lot – not by dint of being an abject failure but by never quite reaching the heights of the other two. Lawrence, however, turns in what might be her best performance yet.

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Joy Mangano, the QVC maven who made her millions with the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing cleaning device borne out of her own frustrations as a single mother living with both her father (Robert De Niro) and her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) in the basement. Bradley Cooper has a small supporting role as Neil Walker, the QVC exec who puts Joy’s product into the market.

Joy isn’t going to go down as Russell’s strongest film – I really do think Silver Linings Playbook holds that title – but I do think Lawrence has done her best work as a member of the Russell company, and I would put very real money on her seeing a third Best Actress nomination at the top of next year. As the eponymous Joy, Lawrence is riveting, from her beleaguered moments in the home to her natural charisma before the QVC camera. The film tasks Joy with representing the struggles faced by all women, and Lawrence is more than capable of bearing that weight.

That universality is one of the peculiarities of the film because I can’t help feeling that it would have been more successful had it adhered more strictly to the unique aspects of Joy’s story rather than an attempt to make her “every woman.” For one, I think the QVC sequences are among the best in the film, and I would have preferred this to be more than a small subplot. Russell has an eye for the innate strangeness of the QVC network, and a fuller treatment of that material (including the wonderfully strange cameo of Melissa Rivers as her mother Joan) would have been truly engaging – to say nothing of the chemistry that Lawrence and Cooper clearly have. Honestly, that’s the movie I thought we were getting, but sadly it’s unlikely we’ll see a Joy 2 that fleshes out that relationship in greater depth.

The movie keeps its eye tightly focused on Joy, often to the detriment of the other performers. It’s not that De Niro or Cooper are any less captivating than they usually are – De Niro is scene-stealing, particularly in an early tantrum about his ex-wife’s similarities with a gas leak – it’s more that there is just less of them to captivate. On reflection, it seems the largest supporting role belongs to Isabella Rossellini as Trudy, Joy’s principal investor and commercial mentor of sorts whose idiosyncratic approach to vetting entrepreneurs lends the film one of its greatest moments of empowerment. These moments provide glimpses of the A+ work that Joy might have aspired to be, had it taken off its Lawrence-shaped blinders.

Rotten Tomatoes has the self-congratulatory pun that the film “only sporadically sparks bursts of the titular emotion.” This joke misses the point of the film, because if you wanted a movie about joy you’ll have to check out Pixar’s summer offering Inside Out. This is instead a film about Joy, whose story is told reasonably well here, though the audience rightfully detects that Russell is capable of a fuller film than this. It’s perfectly serviceable, but transcendence belongs to the earlier films in this unofficial trilogy.

Joy is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language.” As might be expected, De Niro gets one F-bomb.

Big Night (1996)

There's something about Italian accents, I think, especially when they're mingled with shoutings about food and good-spirited feuding. From The Godfather to Goodfellas, from The Sopranos to Cake Boss (an exciting and hysterical reality show about cakemakers in Jersey), I've never been able to resist the dulcet tones of the Italian culture.

There's no Mafia in Big Night, but we do have Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as brothers Secondo and Primo, who own and run the Paradise restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. They aren't doing great business and find themselves in some financial trouble, thanks in part to the uninspired yet heavily commercialized competition across the street. Their competitor Pascal (Ian Holm) is waiting out their business in the hopes that Primo and Secondo will eventually come work for him, but Pascal tosses the brothers a bone when he says that - as a personal favor - he's invited musical bigshot Louis Prima to dine at their restaurant tomorrow night. With one day to prepare for the big night, tensions flare as high as the flames in the kitchen.

I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Why isn't Stanley Tucci an A-lister? Between this, The Devil Wears Prada, and the trailer for Julie & Julia, it's high time that Mr. Tucci starts getting some of the respect that he deserves. Though he looks a lot like Andy Garcia in this one (perhaps they and Mark Strong should get together and play a trio of brothers), Tucci is in good form, emotionally gripping in one breath and comedically gifted in the next. Plus, Tucci co-wrote and co-directed Big Night. Can we please get this guy the recognition he deserves? (At least he's hitched his wagon to the Meryl Streep star, so at least more people will be seeing his films.) Shalhoub (TV's Monk) has the stronger temper and thus more of the comic opportunity, but he's got a real chemistry with Tucci, and it's not hard to believe the two are brothers.

But the scene stealer in the movie is neither Minnie Driver nor Isabella Rosselini nor even Allison Janney as love interests; for big stars, none of these three ladies (who have proven themselves elsewhere to be fairly gifted, professionally speaking) are given much to do, though Rosselini tries the best of the three. No, the real "best supporting actor" as it were is Ian Holm as Pascal. Though he's not terribly convincing as an Italian (his accent isn't as impeccable as Tucci & Shalhoub's), his turn as a top restaurateur and expert salesman (particularly of himself and his grandiose personality) is superb. If you ever wondered how Pixar & Co. chose Holm for the villainous Skinner in Ratatouille, look no further than his entertaining used car salesman of a cuisine king.

I came into this expecting a laugh-out-loud comedy, which the film delivers though only sporadically in top-notch moments (see: preceding paragraph) and not in a consistent cheek-wounding capacity like The Hangover did. It's more appropriately a drama film with a comedic streak. As a result, there was a bit in this film that felt unnecessary; a subplot involving infidelty felt like fat that needed to be trimmed from this steak of a film, making its characters too fallible and unnecessarily complex. Furthermore, there's a predictable ending, accompanied with a familiar message about how all we really have is each other (a theme I prefer delivered in the "Family first" capacity of Arrested Development). But the film scores points on execution here, because the film's final scene is a deaf play between Primo, Secondo, and Cristiano (a young Marc Anthony) - all done in one long take. Of course, I just melt like garlic in a frying pan when I see a well-done long take.

For a few well-done moments, well-timed dialogue, and a top performance from Ian Holm, Big Night is hot. The film, though, tends more to simmer than sizzle and so is best appreciated like a fine wine and not a quick shot of what-have-you.

Big Night is rated "R for language," most of which comes from moderate use of the F-word, primarily from Pascal. But that's part of what makes him so endearing, to me!