Joy 2024 Movie Review
It’s the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, we’re likely going to see a slew of follow-ups based on similar stories that will capitalize on audiences’ interest in biographical films of those who made great breakthroughs in the world of science. Netflix’s Joy from director Ben Taylor, although it chronicles a development in science, takes a wildly different approach from Nolan’s “Great Man” epic. The story of the three people who worked tirelessly for over a decade to find a cure for “childlessness” (or as we know it today, IVF) is one of, naturally, heightened emotions. The film includes the “playing God” anxieties and rage that the public, government, church, and medical community threw at the team, considering them Dr. Frankenstein types. It’s two hours of highs and lows, as each step towards changing the world comes with three steps backward.
A story dealing with such personal, sensitive subject matter requires a particularly careful approach and not the epic, foreboding route that movies like Oppenheimer have taken. Joy movie doesn’t make this mistake, but it’s still where we find the film’s biggest problem. It’s too focused on offering a family-friendly, happy-go-lucky tale of human perseverance that it feels ignorant to the real-world plights of infertility and the toll scientific research takes on people devoting their entire lives to a goal that may never be reached. Every low blow only lasts a few seconds before a Dooby Brothers song plays and the scientists seem all too ready to crack a joke and keep on working. It results in an overly sentimental, mannerly British comedy as if the script took inspiration from a P.G. Wodehouse novel rather than a real-life story of groundbreaking medical pursuits and an arduous decades-long journey to get there.
One of the great credits to the movie has to be its decision to tell it from the perspective of the woman at the center of this story, nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie). It’s through her introduction, though, that we first meet the forcefulness of the movie’s whimsical tone, as we’re spoonfed Jean’s quirky and spunky demeanor because she has a hole in her tights and she has not one, but two toes on show! Oh, Jean! She’s immediately given a job (because, remember, she’s spunky) in the lab of Dr. Bob Edwards (James Norton), a visionary doctor who’s had success in harvesting eggs from hamsters and mice, fertilizing the egg outside of the body, and then implanting the eggs back in the hamster, leading to pregnancy. Bob is adamant about getting Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy), a pioneering doctor in reproductive medicine on his team to carry out the procedure of removing and implanting the eggs. After a friendly and conveniently quick drink, the three agree to set up shop in the dilapidated wing of Oldham Hospital to begin research and trials.
The remainder of the runtime, jumping throughout the years from 1968 to 1978, follows Jean’s personal reckoning with her position as a Christian with an extremely devout mother, who quickly cuts her out for trying to “Play God.” Bob must face the public and their tirades against his interfering with nature, as many believe the babies will be born with abnormalities. Meanwhile, Patrick must accept that part of his job comes with the unsettling power to decide who receives treatment and who doesn’t. We meet several women whose lives would be transformed by this medicine, and the stakes for the three become increasingly more personal, especially for Jean.
The movie does a commendable job of painting a world that feels so archaic by today’s standards. In 2024, IVF is a life-changing but common procedure that has transformed the way we look at reproduction, allowing same-sex couples, single parents, and people struggling with infertility a second chance at having children. In 1960s England, though, it’s seen as a warped form of science and humanity stepping on God’s toes. It’s obviously a very compelling tale of human ambition based on nothing but compassion for those whose lives have been ruined by a medical condition. Bob, Jean, and Patrick, for the most part, are never painted as misunderstood, tortured geniuses who can’t relate to anyone in the world because no one is as great as them. The movie takes care to position the women left distraught by infertility issues as the crux of the story and the sole reason for the three to stay on their grueling journey, not recognition, money, or fame.
It’s this commitment to showing how groundbreaking science affects the everyday person that makes Joy a much more grounded and human movie than most of its kind, which are usually focused on making their main characters appear larger-than-life. Why would you want to focus on men stuck in a lab when IVF is for the benefit of women and families? Joy shows how suffocating a society 1960s Britain was, as couples and women were forced to blame themselves or urged to accept that having a child wasn’t part of God’s plan for them. Its approach to the personal stakes is undoubtedly the most commendable part of the script, so it’s disappointing to see it getting sidelined by the movie being so adamant about throwing in heaps of ill-fitting mannerly whimsy,
Joy’s biggest issue isn’t so much its straightforward narrative structure, but its overly whimsical and sentimental script. While Jack Thorne also penned the Marie Curie biopic, Radioactive, Joy feels more akin to his lighter fare like Wonder and Enola Holmes. One of the biggest sins a movie can commit is by thinking that its audience is stupid. It’s not even that the finer details of the science are overly explained, but that the movie doesn’t leave anything for the viewer to infer. Instead of allowing us a second to gather that a breakthrough is happening by the reactions of the actors or by the movie already heavily intimating it, a character has to say “Whatever it is, it’s working!” It becomes a recurring frustration throughout, grating on the audience as it feels like you’re being spoonfed the ingredients to feel exactly what the movie wants you to. It’s a prime example of telling, not showing, and the film starts to play out like an educational movie for high-schoolers rather than a mainstream feature film.
As commonly seen in British cinema, Joy is painfully sweet at times, and not in the places you’d expect it. A gathering at Bob’s house is interrupted by a phone call from a tabloid asking him if is he Dr. Frankenstein. This should’ve played as a heavier moment that showed the scope of what Bob and Jean are doing, and a foreboding indication of Bob’s years-long fight to have the public understand the importance of his work. Instead, the scene is cut short by Bob’s wife, who promises him he can have extra custard if he sits down because he’s scaring the children! While this movie didn’t need to be Oppenheimer, it didn’t have to go so far in the opposite direction that it adapts the tone of Paddington. After they lose a funding opportunity because the stuffy board members don’t understand their quirky ways, it’s only a matter of seconds before they exchange light-hearted quips and vow to keep going. Of course, it’s all to tie in the characters’ impenetrable ambition and spirit, but it takes away from the deeper consequences of their work.
Thomas McKenzie is a welcome lead performer; if this movie was made even just five years ago, it would’ve surely followed the perspective of Bob, a family man who can’t get the world to understand his vision. The personal stakes of Jean’s story play into the movie’s sentimental tone, but it also works to bring in the human repercussions of IVF. So often in biographical movies, the mad geniuses take up so much of the space that we don’t see the everyday people who either benefit or suffer as a consequence of their scientific breakthroughs. Joy takes care to give space to women like Jean and the hopeful mothers, who are put on nauseating emotional rollercoasters. As one pregnant woman says, “It’s the hope that kills you.” The story of IVF shouldn’t be restricted to men in lab coats. It’s about the women who have neglectful husbands who want a person in the world they can call theirs, or the couples who’ve been told by the Church that they have to accept this life of misery because it’s what God chose for them. This, at the end of the day, was all for them.
While the three lead performances bounce off each other well, McKenzie and Norton slightly fall victim to the movie’s overly sentimental tone. Norton plays Bob as an excited, naive child who’s finally been given the Lego blocks to build his masterpiece while McKenzie’s Jean can lean into the spunky, scrappy stereotypes of female characters in these stories. When the film is nearing too close to Paddington territory, it is the fresh air of Bill Nighy that pulls it back down to the ground. He most resembles a real-life person who has dedicated his life to helping others, and his trademark acerbic wit cuts through the airy tone just when we need it.
Joy, despite being a British production, is your classic Hollywood biographical drama, that does its job of telling you a real-life story. It’s a refreshing twist on the “Great Man” trope and allows a myriad of perspectives into one narrative. It’s the movie’s efforts to make this as digestible as possible for the audience through its light-hearted tone and simplistic dialogue that render it a movie you watch on Netflix with your parents and probably never think about again.
