There are few subjects more emotive than motherhood, but a story about a new way to enable motherhood/parenthood should not have taken why that is as granted. On stage before the world premiere of Joy at the London Film Festival, director Ben Taylor and star James Norton both spoke about the personal importance of this film for them. They also spoke about how, on a professional basis, they thought it was important that the film centered Thomasin McKenzie’s character. This real-life biopic depicting the scientific struggles to enable in vitro fertilization, or IVF, does indeed center the unsung woman at the core of that remarkable scientific breakthrough. In this slick and Americanized version of a very British story, that is not always a good thing.
Bob (Mr. Norton, channeling Robert Redford) is a scientist at Cambridge working with mice in order to research the reasons for infertility. He and Jean (Ms. McKenzie) meet cute when she helps catch an escaped mouse before her job interview to manage Bob’s lab. Obviously he hires her on the spot. Bob is a wealthy man, happily married to Ruth (Jemima Rooper, always a delight) with five beautiful daughters. Jean lives alone but spends a great deal of time with her equally religious though vastly more judgemental mother Gladys (Joanna Scanlan). Once Jean is part of the team, their research progresses quickly enough they begin working with volunteer human patients. These are found through the work of gynecologist Patrick (Bill Nighy), who also provides a disused hospital wing in Oldham, a town in northern England, and a nurse named Muriel (Tanya Moodie). The conversations between Jean and Muriel, in which Jean’s religious qualms about interfering with something normally left up to God are firmly quashed by Muriel’s emphasis on personal choice, are the most obvious pandering to an American audience in Rachel Mason and Jack Thorne’s script. The complete absence of the words national, health and service also make it clear this has not been written for a home audience. Even Mr. Nighy getting to say the one word which guarantees a movie a PG-13 rating in the USA makes the absence of any praise for the NHS even more shocking.
Stranger still is that as the years progress there is almost no focus on the patients who have agreed to participate in the research, not even on Lesley (Ella Bruccoleri) and John (Douggie McMeekin, who makes a vivid impression) Brown, the parents of Louise Brown, the first person worldwide born as a result of IVF. (Joy is her middle name, chosen by Bob.) Instead, the through lines focus on Jean, firstly in her fraught relationship with her mother, who disowns her for playing God. Crueller still is the sad irony that Jean is herself infertile, especially in how that impacts her relationship with the kind Arun (Rish Shah). Patrick has no children either, at least not shown (he had at least one in real life), but here all we learn of his personal life is a grim Second World War story and the fact he plays piano duets with his wife. But of course the assumption – in the movie as in life – is that women obviously want children, hence the importance of this work.
Where Joy is at its best is when it’s a movie about work. Whether that’s Bob peering into a microscope, Patrick delivering difficult news in a matter-of-fact style, or Jean chatting with the women who have agreed to be their test subjects as she injects them, the human expertise that moves scientific progress forward – or not – is Joy’s true focus. The professional respect both Patrick and Bob have for Jean is a delight, and something still rare to see in a movie about men and women working together. It’s such a shame that boring clichés about the feelings of women were nearly allowed to drown that out.
But what makes Joy worth seeing is its fundamental belief that science and medicine exist in order to make things better. Enabling people to live in bodies which work without pain is the best thing humans can do for each other, and showing just how much work goes into this – the stretch of time the movie shows is over a decade – makes it poignantly clear how difficult it can be to earn the expertise which enables people to enjoy their bodies. The movie doesn’t talk about this, of course, but its mere existence does that speaking for it. And if your body can’t do something you want, such as have a baby, anyone who can help you achieve that goal is a hero. So it’s really wonderful, in spite of everything, to see some ordinary heroes have their stories told at last.
Joy recently played at the London Film Festival. It will play in the United States on Netflix on 11/22/2024.
Learn more about the film at the Netflix site for the title.
You might also like…
