Joy to the world: Ali Bacon looks at the problems of merging fact and fiction
When my friend muddled the cinema times and we failed to make The Danish Girl , I wasn’t too disappointed because we plumped for Joy instead. I'd heard good reports of it and was interested to see what Jennifer Lawrence (known to me only through Hunger Games ) would make of the role of a beleaguered mother with an entrepreneurial streak. In the end I did enjoy the film but in some respects was disappointed. The opening depended too much on clips from a TV soap opera to set out the theme of ‘strong woman’. Nor did I feel we needed so much back story of how Joy met her live-in ex and the previous run-ins with her father and half-sister. But then I never was keen on back-story-dump, however engaging the back story might be. As soon as Joy invented her miracle mop, the pace picked up and the plot had its own momentum, but there were still sticking points for me - what did the grandmother add apart from a voice-over? (No I don’t like voice-overs either!) and motifs from Joy...