Joy

Remember those times, well which recur a bit too often during the pivotal years of your academic life where you are just waiting for your motivational gears to start running and you dream of spinning something beautiful, magical worth a million applauses and acknowledgement from your friends and family? Unfortunately spinning something out thin air is fictional, so you seek motivation and ideas from various sources- undeniably entertainment being the most preferable one. The vicarious act of playing the role of Chris Gardner of Pursuit of Happiness or the Stephen Hawking of Theory of Everything in real life momentarily gets you brimming with all the stimulus you need. Well, Joy is another such movie which gives you your lingering motivational treat.

The essence seems pretty clichéd- journey of a successful entrepreneur from rags to riches but don’t desert the movie just because it has the sinews of a clichéd Hollywood story-line. Joy is different. Joy maybe a perfect eclectic mixture of various Hollywood movies revolving around this plot but it still does have something to offer at the end of the day. What I loved about Joy was the portrayal of Joy as a sweet young child with a brain that churns designs. Joy is about a little girl who likes to invent and what I mean by invent is invent ideas, invent solutions for problems of a regular life, and invent solutions which can inspire all categories of society. Though nothing academically glamorous about the child’s brain is highlighted throughout the story, the subtle references by her grandmother to Joy’s intelligence is translated as the desire to invent and design ordinary stuff and hence you are immediately enticed to relate to Joy’s character.

The movie may seem a bit off track in the beginning due to the frequent references to the soap opera scenes but if you look at it closely the dialogues are mere expressive references to the essence of Joy’s journey. Joy, a divorced mother of two with a highly dysfunctional family lives with her parents, her grandmother, her ex-husband and two children in New York. Joy’s dream to design and invent is shown to have ended 17 years back- something as small as this number has a perfect explanation in the story-line. Well, so after she fortunately gets a nightmare that reveals to herself that she cannot survive in this drab routine anymore which is further expedited by a painful injury to her wrist while wringing her mop leads her to get her rusted grey cells working and devise a solution – “a self-wringing mop” for the problem that caused her this injury. Her journey begins here and what follows is the portrayal of how Joy manages to come out of all the hurdles only because of her persistence and devotion to her idea.

The only good part about family in Joy is her grandmother and rest all is just a dysfunctional chaos which contributes to both personal and a bit of professional prejudices as well. I cannot say Joy is one of a kind but it is definitely something you should watch – it lingers and leaves you inspired. “Well if she can do it, so can I!” As I have always said, simplicity is just perfection. Everything about Joy is plain, ordinary and simple and that’s what makes it so valid and fitting into our world. Definitely a movie you should watch- just to get those yens flowing!

Here is some insight into Joy’s life : Joy Mangano