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.
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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.
