Cinemazlowski 'Joy' and 'The Big Short' offer different approaches to American economics

At some point, everyone dreams of getting rich. For most of us, it remains a dream throughout our lives, a desire that seems too intangible and even surreal to actually grasp, even as the media shows us people who achieve that goal every single day.

 

There are as many paths to financial greatness or failure as there are people. But two movies that came out Christmas week – "Joy" and "The Big Short" - show us that there clearly are noble and nefarious ways of going about it, offering viewers plenty to contemplate from the mostly true stories they tell.

 

"Joy" is the latest in a string of memorable films by writer-director David O. Russell, who is riding one of Hollywood history's hottest streaks ever with three straight Best Director and Best Picture Oscar nominations for "The Fighter," "The Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." It's unlikely that "Joy" will match those nods, but it's still got plenty of strong moments to offer.

 

The film tells the story of Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), an Italian-American woman in 1970s upstate New York who was stepped on by seemingly everyone in her family after giving up her childhood dreams of being an inventor. Her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) and her father (Robert DeNiro) both live in the basement of her house, while her delusional mother spends seemingly every waking moment huddled on a bed in her own upstairs room, watching soap operas and living vicariously through their plot twists.

 

Add in the whining demands of two young kids and an airline customer-service job that just downsized her hours, and Joy is desperate to make a change. After having an utterly oddball dream in which she realizes her destiny is to invent things again, Joy shakes things up and invents a mop whose strings can be quickly cleaned between each room of the house.

 

The idea is revolutionary to housewives disgusted by the fact they have to worry about tracking bathroom germs into their kitchens while mopping, and at first it appears that Joy's headed for huge success due to the help of a QVC  home-shopping TV network executive (Bradley Cooper). But Russell lets Mangano's rollercoaster ride play out in the unpredictable fashion of her real-life battles, and that keeps the story intriguing enough to ride out some slow patches in the middle and the fact that we are rooting for a woman to become a millionaire off a mop.

 

Thankfully, Russell maintains his incredible gift for putting together casts that create sheer magic together. Lawrence and Cooper have done three straight films together for him, but it's Lawrence and DeNiro's scenes together that truly jump off the screen and come to vibrant life.

 

Russell drops in several moments where characters speak to each other about the glories of America and the freedom it offers to succeed at any dream imaginable. That is a tonic for our times, but together with Diane Ladd's touching voiceover narration as Joy's grandmother, the movie plays like a fairy tale. Then again, that could be just what viewers need amid our still often dark economic realities.

 

On a moral level, "Joy" has many positive things going for it. While her family is humorously dysfunctional,  they are seen as fairly devout Catholics who draw great strength from their faith. Joy is also deep friends with her ex-husband because they want to be good parents together, and because he proves himself to be a good business and legal advisor along the way.

 

Better yet, it's a celebration of never losing hope and always standing by family,  that has only one discernible "F" word and little if any other foul language in it. And that's a treat worth considering throughout the rest of the Christmas moviegoing season.

 

Meanwhile, "The Big Short" also uses some off-the-wall techniques – including snarky narration and wild montages spotlighting the over-the-top excesses of pre-Great Recession excess on Wall Street - to convey its message. Yet unlike Russell's portrait of hope and inspiration, it spotlights the ruthless maneuvers that some men (led here by the ace cast of Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt) took to make massive fortunes off the utter collapse of the US housing market by betting against it between 2005 and 2008. 

 

"Short" is based on a book by journalist Michael Lewis, whose previous book "Moneyball" was turned into a Best Picture-nominated film and managed to bring the convoluted economic tricks used by Oakland A's management to create a championship baseball team at bargain-basement prices. Here, co-writer/director Adam McKay and his writing partner Charles Rudolph take infinitely more complicated economic maneuvers and manage to teach viewers about them with a good dose of wit to boot.

 

Among his bag of tricks are brief segments in which hot actress Margot Robbie explains one kind of deal while drinking champagne in a bubble bath, or chef Anthony Bourdain uses the food he cooks to explain how no one seemed to notice when America's biggest bankers were pulling devastating shenanigans right under our noses.

 

The idea being conveyed overall by "The Big Short" is that modern-day Americans have put far too much trust in politicians to control economic abuses by Wall Street. Even worse, all the lessons we and our leaders supposedly learned from the crash of 2008 haven't really been taken to heart, as the movie's ending explanations of where each of the men wound up reveals.

 

While "The Big Short" has strong lessons to offer as well, its methods are vastly different.  These are high-strung guys in desperate straits, who didn't realize until it was too late that the games they're playing with America's economic system are far more devastating than they'd ever intended.

 

The movie reflects that dark energy with frequent foul language including plenty of F words, and with a couple of scenes in which the men visit strip clubs to burn off the fact they have way too much money. But the nudity is relatively quick and not very exploitive. Most adults should be able to handle these aspects en route to powerful and – according to a Republican-politician friend of mine – a fair and balanced movie rather than a heavily biased hatchet job.

 

With Oscar-worthy performances by Steve Carell and Christian Bale, plus ace support from the rest of the cast, "The Big Short" manages to be one economics lesson that no one should snooze through. Our very future as a nation depends on keeping our eyes open, always.