Joy

The lukewarm reception of Joy will hopefully shake David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence out of the complacency that this bric-a-brac movie is surely the product of, but I want to take a moment to give them points for their sheer, batshit audacity. It’s a pleasure to think about and a pain to write about because it’s so chocked full of nuts that it’s hard to figure out which layers are intended as bullshit and which layers aren’t intended as bullshit but really, truly are. Wading in this septic think tank can put one in touch with the sublime; it’s like listening to an interview with William Shatner. But it can also be exhausting. Joy feels suspiciously like the last few Russell-Lawrence collaborations, but they power through this one as if under a 108-degree fever. They’ve sweat off the emotional weight.

First, the good stuff: This is a movie about a mop. That’s about the best thing I can say about it. I’ve never seen a film, or engaged with any work of art intended for adults, that has put a human face on household products. The mop is a symbol of our modern-day Cinderella’s domestic oppression as well as her ticket to freedom. More importantly, Joy in Joy makes the case that the mop mod she’s invented will shave minutes off your chores. Those minutes add up, and add value to your life. What Joy represents is utopianism on a granular scale: so granular that her ilk is often unfairly overlooked. Viewed through this prism, as-seen-on-TV junk is transfigured. Who knew that one might find an unsung hero behind ped eggs and lint removers and containers of OxiClean? Look deep into the food processor or up a set of knives and one might find the traces of a human being who was trying to make the world a better place. Joy sells her mop on QVC, back when shopping from home was a novel thing, and the film makes it clear that the network stands for something other than late-capitalist malaise. For a tweaker like Joy, it’s an honest-to-goodness platform for ideas.

Russell can make these points, and Lawrence can sell them through her dimples, all while going headlong into butterscotch-and-brown late-’80s kitsch. Their contrarian impulse has swagger, and it’s essentially humane. This is a female-empowerment movie without malice, but also, perhaps, without mental toughness. When one of QVC’s most experienced on-air personalities tries to shill for it, Joy’s mop is a flop, so the inventor decides to get in front of the camera herself. Bradley Cooper, as the slick head of programming, tries to weigh her down with bangle bracelets and gallons of hairspray, but she insists on going before the lights in plainclothes, so the viewers see the aw-shucks in her eyes. Guess what? It works!

American Hustle

If the fashions of the 1970s indicate a culture that had given in, the fashions of the 1980s indicate a culture that had given in but was pretending not to have. In the ’70s, couched in disillusionment, people weren’t hypocritical about being hypocritical; Americans indulged in new freedoms that they hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of. This wayward decade seems to be the spiritual home of the director David O. Russell, who turned 16 in 1974: the year that American Hustle takes off. Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), whose chest hair garnishes a leisure suit which is open all the way down to the gut, are two fish grooving in this brave new sea, though their sense of class is informed by an even earlier period; they fall in love over a Duke Ellington L.P.

Russell’s take on the ’70s in America differs greatly from Tomas Alfredson’s view of England during the same era in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Britain’s finest hadn’t just given in—they’d given up. For small-time con artists like Irving, who bilks money out of other small fry by way of bogus loans, and Sydney, who assists him in the imperial guise of “Lady Edith,” this is a period of market expansion—until they get busted by Bradley Cooper in curls, an F.B.I. agent named Richie Di Maso. He takes a shine to Sydney—who still talks like Edith, even if her posh accent is less convincing than the Lady Eve’s—and decides to give the pair a break if they help him snare other criminals; they—Irving less willingly than Sydney—agree to help, and their con spirals out to the highest levels of the Mafia. To Irving’s way of thinking, however, it had gotten out of hand once the trap was set on Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the mayor of Camden, N.J., whose graft for the cause of a rebuilt Atlantic City reads as corrupt to Richie but, to Irving, looks like the long game fairly played. All the while, Sydney plays them both—and herself, too.

Though very different in style and tone, American Hustle is a caper comedy with quirk baked in like The Brothers Bloom. Both take the idea of con men to Samuel Beckett extremes, and do so with self-awareness plateauing at healthy levels. But, with its roots in social realities, and in movies rooted in social realities—Bloom popped out of Wes Anderson and Fellini; Hustle Altman and Scorsese—Hustle attempts something more daring: Russell doesn’t only want to make a movie in the style of the ’70s masters, he wants to zero in on the sensibility that formed them. As someone whose taste in movies was born in that golden age before my birth, I can’t help but be thrilled by the spirit of his attempt. The big filmmakers of the ’70s were primarily Catholics and Jews—Russell is half-Italian and half-Jewish—and the adoration of Mayor Polito smacks of a certain form of tribalism native to the period. If The Godfather showed that the American Dream was paid for in blood, it also showed an ascendancy from Ellis Island that the sons and grandsons of immigrants could take pride in. Like the student protesters at U.C. Berkeley, their forebears were anti-establishment—but anti-establishment because they had to be. In the flattening of wealth that followed World War II, the ethnic diversity of the middle class boomed; but the aspirations were still hunky-dory Protestant in manner. In Bonnie and Clyde, the youth of a generation said “our turn”; that sentiment then rippled through the generation’s ethnic pockets. This self-identification, which can alas get mawkish, turgid, or worse, gave movies like Mean Streets some of their verve. The American Dream was rewritten in the vernacular.

Silver Linings Playbook

Sometimes the power of positive thinking seems more acceptable when the people spouting it have been to hell and back. It’s a sympathetic reflex–if they think that will help them get their shit together, might as well let them try. Silver Linings Playbook softens us up with this technique, but the conditioning only goes so far. There’s a precise cutoff point when it goes from indie dramedy to straight-up rom-com; it’s as if Jennifer Lawrence were being replaced by Jennifer Aniston, and Bradley Cooper was being swapped out with, well, Bradley Cooper.

Not to rag on the guy. My main impression of him still comes from The Hangover, which he coasted through like an apotheosized frat boy. He had a leading-man stick up his ass, but none of the charisma that he shows here–a good-humored and sly satire of charisma that blurs it with crazy. The movie starts with his character, Pat, being let out of an institution that treated him for bipolar disorder; he’d caught his wife in the shower with another man, and socked the philanderer hard enough to squeeze a restraining order out of him. And Pat’s wife. So it’s Pat’s mission to convince her that he’s in shape and in control. We all know that isn’t going to happen; it’s just not the nature of the game. But the director, David O. Russell, postpones the inevitable with a vision of working-class Philadelphia that’s all loose screws. Diagnosed or not, everybody’s got something that someone could prescribe a pill for. But it’s not a broadside about our culture of medication–rather, it vindicates a society in which neurosis is the norm. The movie is consciously made in the spirit of the ’70s films of Robert Altman and Paul Mazursky, and even a Scorsese film like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; those directors embraced kooky Americana in all its jaggedness. Russell knows how to externalize mania in a way that layers anxiety upon anxiety–especially in the sound design–and, somehow, the immediacy of Masanobu Takayanagi’s handheld camera never gets stale.

But there’s a moment when Robert De Niro, as Pat’s book-making father, comes around to Tiffany, Lawrence’s nymphomanical widow, with his trademark puff of the lip and jerk of the wrist, and it’s as if he’s raising a white flag on behalf of his generation. That’s a dramatic way of putting it, I admit, but the movie takes to contrivance like a junkie and its focus-group concessions start to jump out of the woodwork: Oh, I get it, they’ve thrown in some football for the guys and a dance contest for the girls. Even Pat’s family being what’s-a-matta-you Italian seems suspect. To the film’s credit, however, enough good will spills over from the first half to make the betrayal of the second bearable–at least to me. (Bearable–even peppy–but not believable.) Maybe it’s because this is the rare movie where everybody has something to prove and yet nobody has a chip on his or her shoulder. Lawrence comes at us like a juggernaut of tightly wound emotions that clash with Pat’s aloof magical thinking; she may be compensating a bit for the tentativeness of her sylvan heroines, but her drive spills over into the role. Russell, for his part, makes it clear that Silver Linings Playbook belongs to the same chapter of his smorgasbord career as The Fighter; the charm of these bald attempts at inspiration makes one think that maybe he’s been to hell and back.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games trilogy bears about the same relationship to its publisher, Scholastic, as Downton Abbey does to PBS. (Full disclosure: I mainlined the whole dystopic kit n’ caboodle in under two weeks, and I read as fast as a centenarian drives.) It’s plotted like a first-person shooter, but it’s got its safety on: Even the most tsk-trolling P.T.A. will accept a story about kids killing kids if the kids’ martyrdom keeps publishing houses from croaking. In Suzanne Collins’s glass-half-empty vision, the United States’s successor is an empire called Panem. The ruling class of its Capitol maintains its sybaritic lifestyle by subjugating a dozen districts, and forcing two randomly selected adolescent “tributes” from each to compete in their yearly Hunger Games—literal must-see TV in this fascist mediaocracy. From this gladiatorial smackdown only one victor can emerge, and it’s usually one of the city-slicker jocks who’s been reared ’roided up and raring for combat. I’m not sure whether we’re meant to see the logic as shaky, but the theory is that the oppressed will hold onto the shred of hope that maybe, this year, one of their conscripts will win—and that’s enough to keep a lid on insurrection. But one glance at the faces of District 12’s proles—who make the oiks in Metropolis look like One Direction—and you know they ain’t buyin’ it.

However, one doesn’t make one’s way to grammar-school reading lists through fisticuffs alone. The Games are a nightmare lampoon of celebrity culture, media culture, sport culture, government overreach, and technocracy, executed smoothly enough to offend everyone except each individual reader—who’s given a place of privilege beyond the bounds of his or her society. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Collins pulls a Fountainhead, but the same manipulative technique—which, to be fair, is a hard one to avoid—is afoot. She’s saying to impressionable young readers, via an extremely accessible mass medium, that they’re a step ahead of mass culture. (Not that she doesn’t slip this in through the back door, and do so compellingly. Tributes get fêtes, feasts, and paraded around like show dogs, primped and permed and branded like race cars that the investors intend to see crash. This is all packaged and broadcast; the better your story is framed, the better your chances of getting goodies in the ring. In short, it’s survival of the most telegenic. Tributes—by having their lives put wantonly at stake—get exactly what everyone my age and younger is reported to desire more than anything else: sudden super-stardom.) This may not be what she set out to do, but it’s problematic in an era when the media is increasingly participatory. As Landon Palmer elegantly puts it, “We are all simultaneously consumers and critics of mass culture.” Ergo: All us talking heads, yakking away about this on blogs and in bars, are implicated. But Collins doesn’t take the crucial step back that Orwell and Huxley did to explain the psychology of the suckered. We’re meant to identify with the hayseed heroine, Katniss, but aren’t we more like the club kids of the Capitol, gussied up like ghosts of beheaded French courtesans, indulgent in their decadent “media-savvy”—which an outsider turns against them?

The slippery-slope critique is both ingenious and inevitable; but there’s a relentlessness to Collins’s violence, both in its description and escalation—and in how each point that’s raised is promptly buried by a counterpoint—that roils beneath the plot, and even the ideas. Not to prolong any comparisons to Ayn Rand, but there’s a borderline sadomasochistic tug to the way things get bleaker and bleaker, as if the author were storing up her literary mojo for the Grand Guignol; and in these inspired passages, she’s both exact and bloodcurdling, like pictures from a war zone. (She didn’t spare much energy for her sense of humor. The only evidence that she has one is in that the baker’s son’s name sounds like “pita.”) I don’t think she gets off on it; I do think she beat herself up with it. But she gloms onto the present-day obsession with design—most notably in the person of Katniss’s appointed stylist Cinna, who crafts an opening-ceremonies costume for the unkempt heroine that goes on to spark revolutionary fervor—without delving deeply into the aesthetics with which the game-makers would justify their sadism. As narrator, Katniss evokes Mattie Ross; we see the gap between us and her and her and her feelings. The burden of introspection is shouldered by Peeta, the male lead, so the reader experiences love as a tragicomic inconvenience. Collins has it both ways with him, too: He’s the exemplar of honor and sensitivity, and he’s also the most skillful manipulator. The series stresses the importance of gaming the system, and the value of perception over reality; but by the third book, it’s contemptuous of that reality—a Y-A poem of force about futility and resignation.