Up first we have "Joy," the third
collaboration between David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence. And
despite its slightness and its messiness, it's an enjoyable one.
Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, a single mother stuck in a dead-end job who
has had to put her dreams on hold in order to support her mess of a
family. This includes father Rudy (Robert DeNiro), mother Terri
(Virginia Madsen), and her ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez), who
is living in her basement. One day Joy has an idea for a self-wringing
mop, and decides to become an entrepreneur, manufacturing and selling
the mops herself. However, getting production going, finding willing
buyers, and evading all the crooks and swindlers in her path is
daunting. Joy has to fight for everything - and often against everyone.
There
are a lot of things that don't work in "Joy." It's full off oddball
characters who don't all fit, and weird, half-baked conceits. David O.
Russell stuffs a scene of soap opera kitsch into the opening, perhaps
trying to signal that he's self-aware of how melodramatic the story
is, that just comes across as bizarre and out of place. His talented
ensemble is often reduced to a pack of broad caricatures, especially as
he loves to have them all shouting at once in intense situations. And,
as many viewers have noted, Jennifer Lawrence is at least a decade too
young to be playing Joy Mangano. However, this doesn't stop her from
being excellent in the role. She and Bradley Cooper, who shows up in
the second act as a QVC executive, manage to keep the wobbly movie on
track and upright all the way to the feel-good finish.
I'm
afraid the Lawrence and Russell partnership has hit the point of
diminishing returns. Russell has given his leading lady some excellent
parts, and Joy Mangano is no exception, but I desperately want both of
them to move on to other things. Russell is trying, but he's made a
romantic comedy, a heist film, and now a Horatio Alger Lifetime movie
that all essentially feel like the same film, with the same awful
loudmouth characters and haphazard scripting. Lawrence, meanwhile, has
been stuck either playing a teenager or a thirty-something for the past
several years, and desperately needs some parts that are actually
appropriate for her. I haven't seen her in anything since "Silver
Linings Playbook" that's been a good fit. In "Joy," it feels like
they're both treading water. It's a pleasant, inoffensive diversion,
but I know it's well below what either are capable of.
Then
we have "Concussion," a far more by-the-numbers piece of work, starring
Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist. If you've
heard anything about the film, you likely know that it's about Omalu's
discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in professional
football players, and his struggle to get the condition recognized and
taken seriously in the face of serious opposition by the NFL. The film
is built around Omalu, using his personal life and career struggles as
subplots. Smith delivers a strong performance, one of his best in a
while, and I'm a little perturbed that viewers seem to be getting hung
up on the Nigerian accent he adopts for the part. He also has some good
support from Alec Baldwin and Albert Brooks as other doctors, and Gugu
Mbatha-Raw as his love interest, Prema.
"Concussion"
sticks pretty close to the usual man against the system template,
playing up Omalu's uncompromising nature and the suffering of the dead
players who were found to have CTE. Unfortunately, though
writer/director Peter Landesmann delivers a perfectly watchable film, I
didn't find it nearly as compelling as the "Frontline" documentary I saw
on the subject a few years ago, or the articles that have chronicled
the continuing impact of the discovery on the NFL. I suspect that the
biggest problem is the way the film was structured. Though we spend
some time with the doomed football players, we never get to know them in
any particular depth, so the stakes are never established beyond what
others tell us are the stakes.
The film is
ultimately not about the disease, but about the doctor who discovered
it, and that's a very different story. It's well told, at least, and I
found that the low-key romance between Omalu and Prema, both immigrants
from Africa, was an unexpected highlight. "Concussion" works nicely as a
small scale character piece, and I wish that could have been what it
wanted to be from the start. As a social issue film, it's fairly benign
and toothless. There have been rumors of the NFL tampering, but I
suspect the more fundamental problems with the script are the more
likely culprits.
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