WRITER/director David O Russell has made some worthy films and employed actress Jennifer Lawrence in several of them.

In this fairytale drama inflating the American dream beyond bursting point, Ms Lawrence plays Joy, a childhood whiz at designing little useful things.  The film concentrates on what happens when as a wife and mother, the only stable personality in several generations of eccentrics, she designs a hands-free squeeze mop.

The gizmo works. The problem is how to sell enough of them to cover costs and bail her family out of its financial morass.

Proposing that telemarketing is the retailing channel of the future, “Joy” gets inside the industry that feeds on consumers who use phone or the web to buy stuff that they might not really need. 

How do buyers know what’s hot? From TV channels that do nothing but sell, sell, sell. Bradley Cooper, another of Russell’s regulars, plays a telemarketing CEO whose warm bonhomie scared me as he outlined the tricks of the telemarketing trade!

If you invent a desirable gizmo, hot-foot it to a patent attorney. By not doing that, Joy takes a drubbing at the hands of unscrupulous guys. Here’s where the film shows its true colours. Joy takes those rascals on, conquering their villainy in a single stroke.

Our last view of her is as president of a firm that makes and markets gizmos. Sure, that can and may even happen. But it’s a slow, difficult and expensive process, not the magical transformation that Russell has conferred on Joy, thereby depriving his film of a more fertile field to plough. 

At Palace Electric, Dendy, Capitol 6 and Limelight