Joy marks the third time that director David O. Russell has teamed with Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro. The first two — Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle — were both massive successes and the all-star squad is looking to go three-for-three with this latest project.
Even without revealing much about the film’s plot, the first two trailers had us intrigued, and late last week, 20th Century Fox released a new clip for the film that … has us intrigued even without revealing much about the film’s plot.
Entitled, You Said That, the clip showcases Jennifer Lawrence (Joy) taking Bradley Cooper’s character to task for something he said, but apparently didn’t back up with his actions. Again, we don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but there are a couple of interesting takeaways.
First: Jennifer Lawrence is magnetic. Point blank, period. There’s a reason she’s the highest-paid actress in the biz and, even in a 40-second, out-of-context clip, she’s capable of giving you the chills.
Second: The more we see of this film, the more it looks like a star vehicle designed to position Lawrence for some hardware come awards season. Even the clip we’re given is more “look how well J-Law can act” than “look how awesome this movie is going to be.” While these sorts of family epics are often overly ambitious and have a tendency to fall flat, if this works, it will be because Lawrence made it work, which in turn may put her in the Best Actress conversation.
You can watch the clip above, and we’ll leave you with a snippet of the official synopsis provided by Fox, the film’s distributor. Joy hits theaters Dec. 25, 2015.
“Joy is the wild story of a family across four generations centered on the girl who becomes the woman who founds a business dynasty and becomes a matriarch in her own right. Betrayal, treachery, the loss of innocence and the scars of love, pave the road in this intense emotional and human comedy about becoming a true boss of family and enterprise facing a world of unforgiving commerce …”