A textbook inspirational movie about a world changing scientific breakthrough, Joy is superficial; merely scratching the surface of a complex and deep topic. It is also assuredly entertaining, well constructed, and bolstered by a trio of great leading performances from perfectly cast actors, which makes the boilerplate plotting, pacing, and writing a lot easier to swallow. Joy doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel. It just wants to tell a good, uplifting, and once again relevant story that boasts a subtly profound message amid its more obvious pandering to mainstream audiences.
Directed by British television veteran Ben Taylor, Joy tells the story of the decade long process of making in vitro fertilization a reality. The idea of helping women who can’t bear children in a traditional way by fertilizing an egg outside the human body belonged to scientist (and eventual failed politician) Robert Edwards (James Norton). He found a great deal of encouragement in the form of nurse, embryologist, and lab manager Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), a sexually active spitfire with concerns about her own ability to have children and a deeply religious mother that will disown her if she continues to “play God” in this laboratory environment. Their core team is rounded out by surgeon and obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy), who graciously gives Robert and Jean space to carry out their tests and is one of the only leading male doctors who seems to care about women’s health matters. In addition to the numerous scientific setbacks and disappointments, Jean, Ben, and Patrick constantly have to contend with religious detractors and a rabid media that want to paint their goal of curing infertility as immoral.
The point of Joy is to take an enormous task rife with scientific, sexual, and religious implications and make it easy for mainstream audiences to understand. There are plenty of big speeches, lingering shots of slides being examined under microscopes, a plethora of pop hit needle drops from the 60s and 70s, and a score that sounds like it could be interchanged with the music from any number of other inspirational dramas. Taylor pitches Joy straight down the middle, but thankfully he’s hitting the target with a great degree of accuracy. The period settings are nicely rendered, as is the costuming, and it’s all quite polished and neat to look at. The three leads are also more than up to the task at hand, commanding each of their roles and bringing a considerable amount of passion to otherwise rote material. It’s appealing, but basic.
But what gives Joy an air of timeliness and importance is in the way it illustrates how huge of a leap this was for female medicine, and how – quite frustratingly – we haven’t come all that far since. (Something that hits harder at the very end, when Taylor employs the tried and true “here’s what happened next” rundown just before the credits.) The greatest and least forced moments of drama in Joy don’t come from the grand arguments about the morality of IVF, but rather through spending time with the female patients themselves, most of whom haven’t had their concerns taken seriously by doctors before. The spectre of endometriosis (a major cause of infertility and a litany of other health problems) looms in the background of Joy, and it’s a noteworthy inclusion since so little progress has been made in the study of that disease. The biggest fight in Joy doesn’t always feel like a battle between bible thumpers and scientists, but rather on the part of the suffering women who just want their ailments to be recognized, noted, and treated with the same amount of care and funding as their male counterparts. Granted, that’s also a topic of discussion that has been parsed before, but Joy makes sure that this point in particular is the emotional lynchpin of an otherwise middlebrow movie. And the film as a whole is much better for doing so.
Joy streams on Netflix starting Friday, November 22, 2024.
