In 1989, Joy Mangano is a divorced mother of two, working as a booking clerk for Eastern Airlines. She lives with her two young children, her mother, Terri, her grandmother, Mimi, and her ex-husband, Tony in Quogue, New York. Her parents are divorced, and her mother and father fight whenever her father shows up at her home. Joy’s older half-sister,
Peggy, is an overachiever who constantly humiliates Joy in front of her children. Peggy and Joy’s father Rudy are very close. Terri spends all day lying in bed watching soap operas as a means of escape from her life, leaving Joy to run the household. Only Joy’s grandmother and her best friend Jackie encourage her to pursue her inventing ambitions and become a strong successful woman.
After divorcing his third wife, Joy’s father starts dating Trudy, a wealthy Italian widow with some business experience. While on Trudy’s boat, Joy drops a glass of red wine, attempts to mop up the mess, and cuts her hands on the broken glass while wringing the mop. Joy returns home and creates blueprints for a self-wringing mop. She builds a prototype with help from the employees at her father’s shop.
She then convinces Trudy to invest in the product. They make a deal with a company in California to manufacture the mop’s parts at a low price. In order to avoid a potential lawsuit, Joy also pays $50,000 in royalties to a man in Hong Kong who supposedly has created a similar product. When the company repeatedly bills Joy for faulty parts they create, Joy refuses to pay the fees and tells her father, Trudy, and Peggy not to pay them.
Joy is advised by Trudy to take out a second mortgage on her home, in order to pay her costs. Joy needs a quick, easy way to advertise her product, and is able to meet with QVC executive Neil Walker. Neil is impressed and shows Joy his infomercials, where celebrities sell entrepreneur’s products through a telethon system. Neil tells Joy to manufacture 50,000 mops. The first infomercial fails, but when she goes on QVC, Joy and her product become an overnight success. Things look up for the family, with the mop earning thousands of dollars on QVC, and Terri falls for Toussaint, a Haitian plumber Joy hired earlier in the film to fix up a leak in Terri’s bedroom.
Joy is an American biographical comedy-drama film written and directed by David O. Russell. The film is about a struggling single mom of three children, Joy Mangano, who invented the “Miracle Mop” and is the President of Ingenious Designs, LLC. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Mangano, Bradley Cooper as an executive at the Home Shopping Network, Robert De Niro as Mangano’s father, and Édgar Ramírez as Joy’s ex-husband. Filming began in Boston on February 16, 2015. The film is scheduled to be released on December 25, 2015.
Joy
Directed by: David O. Russell
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Drena De Niro, Dascha Polanco, Isabella Rossellini, Virginia Madsen, Elisabeth Röhm, Erica McDermott, Madison Wolfe
Screenplay by: David O. Russell
Production Design by: Judy Becker
Cinematography by: Linus Sandgren
Film Editing by: Alan Baumgarten, Jay Cassidy, Tom Cross, Christopher Tellefsen
Costume Design by: Michael Wilkinson
Set Decoration by: Heather Loeffler
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language.
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: December 25, 2015
Visits: 77
