Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actor

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Supporting Actor

The nominees are:

Sterling K. Brown in American Fiction

Robert De Niro in Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer

Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Sterling K. Brown in American Fiction

In American Fiction, Brown plays Cliff, brother of the uptight protagonist Monk (Jeffrey Wright). We spend so much time with the buttoned-up Monk that when we meet Cliff, it’s like a breath of fresh air. Finally, someone willing to let loose and just be himself. Cliff has his own set of personal issues, as well, but compared to his brother, he’s a picture of enlightenment. First-time nominee Brown also imbues the character with such heart and humanity that we are able to look past the flaws and see the wounded but loving person underneath it all.

Robert De Niro in Killers of the Flower Moon

As remarkable as it may seem for someone widely considered one of the best, if not the best, actors of his generation, I think we may be at a point where we’re undervaluing De Niro. Now, to some degree, he did it to himself. Years of crummy studio comedies and nondescript thrillers with names like Heist and Killing Season have not helped him maintain an A+ credit rating in the minds of viewers. But, with good material and a good director to motivate him (how about good friend Martin Scorsese?), De Niro can absolutely still reach into his bag and pull out a performance you’ve never seen before.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, he plays, for all intents and purposes, the devil. He fashions William Hale, the mastermind of the Osage Reign of Terror, as a man of fake beneficence, masking a calm, calculated menace. It’s the darkest kind of evil, and De Niro plays it so subtly, so masterfully that you could almost mistake it for charm. It is some of the best work the actor has delivered in the latter section of his career.

This marks De Niro’s eighth career Oscar nomination, which actually seems low for a performer of his caliber and renown. It’s tied for 10th-most all time. He has five nominations for Best Actor and one win for Raging Bull and three nominations for Supporting Actor along with one win for The Godfather Part II.

Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer

As depicted in this movie, Lewis Strauss is the perfect antagonist to J. Robert Oppenheimer. He’s a career bureaucrat with aspirations of political power who sees Oppenheimer as a means to an end. He uses him, betrays him, and discards him, all with a smile. Downey is one of the best actors in the business at killing with a smile, and he puts that power to great effect here in one of his finest dramatic roles.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 31 years since Downey received his first Oscar nomination for playing Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin. He’s lived multiple lifetimes since then, seeing his star rise and fall and rise again amid a battle with addiction. He became the face of the superhero boom that has lasted the better part of the past 15 years. He scored his second Oscar nomination in 2008 for Tropic Thunder at just about the last moment in history you could be rewarded for a performance in blackface. It’s been a helluva ride, and it appears the next stop on that journey is the Oscars stage.

Ryan Gosling in Barbie

There has been a lot of talk about Gosling’s Ken stealing the movie from Barbie. I wouldn’t go that far. Margot Robbie has the incredibly difficult task of holding the emotional center of the film together, while Gosling can mostly go for broke, getting the biggest laughs of the movie. This is not a knock on the performance, which is stellar, but it’s important that the record reflects: Robbie and Barbie own the Barbie movie. Gosling is just Ken. And, that’s more than Kenough.

This is Gosling’s third career nomination. The first two were for Best Actor for Half Nelson and La La Land. It’s been thrilling to watch Gosling avoid the pitfalls that come with Hollywood stardom. After The Notebook, he could easily have become the next big romantic lead, playing the hunky guy in a bunch of middling fare that would go straight to Netflix these days. Instead, he has made it a point to choose daring projects with exciting directors, and we’re all better off for it.

Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Ruffalo now has four Academy Award nominations, all for Supporting Actor. It’s a fascinating niche he has carved for himself in Hollywood. He could, of course, lead movies and has been a great leading man as recently as Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters in 2019. But, when you need an actor to take over one portion of a larger narrative and to do so with depth and nuance and gravitas, well, he’s your man.

In this case, it’s the middle section of Bella Baxter’s (Emma Stone) journey, during which Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn represents both the freedom of a larger world and the repression of social graces. Ruffalo is perfect as a man who thinks he has his world all figured out, then falls apart as soon as anything disrupts this assumption. The performance is sexy and strange and volatile in ways we have rarely seen Ruffalo on screen.

The final analysis

There’s really no second choice here. It’s Downey all the way. At the beginning of the season and throughout the critics awards announcements, it seemed like there might be a bit of a race among Downey, Gosling, and even Ruffalo. But, once the major industry awards kicked off, Downey took the lead and never looked back.

Downey is very good in Oppenheimer, but this is undoubtedly a career achievement award, an opportunity to reward a beloved actor who has been in the game for 40 years and experienced all the ups and downs Hollywood has to offer. Sometimes, it’s just your time.

Will win: Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer

Should win: Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Should have been here: Jamie Bell in All of Us Strangers

A note about my favorite snub: This could just as easily have been Paul Mescal for me from the same film as he is magnificent as the protagonist’s love interest and potential lifeline, but I give the edge to Bell. The former child star who won a BAFTA for best actor at 14 years old is stellar throughout the film but truly shines in a moment of reconciliation when he admits he, too, would likely have bullied his gay son had they known each other in school. The scene ends with a hug that just shatters your heart, and Bell plays it perfectly.

Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review

The tendency in people is to look for a lesson, a theme, some kind of connecting thread to give all the chaos around us meaning and purpose. We invent religions and other systems of belief to cope. We study far-off stars and earth-bound microbes in search of answers. We talk, hopefully, with each other – as opposed to at each other, over each other, or not at all – creating communities to guide us, comfort us, and protect us. There must be some reason, we think, we wonder, we hope, and in the face of great uncertainty, we press on.

All of this is to say 2017 did not make much sense. At times, navigating the past 12 months felt like creeping through a dimly lit corridor, grasping at shadows instead of the light. I won’t get too political here – there will be plenty of time for that later – except to say it was a bad year and logic suggests this will be even worse.

Last Cinema Standing began as a way to start a conversation about films, to relate them to people’s lives, and to foster a deeper appreciation for what the movies can teach us about ourselves and each other. In the face of the world as it is, it is fair to ask if that mission still has meaning. I submit it means more now than ever before. I am fond of quoting Roger Ebert and in particular his calling the cinema “a machine that generates empathy.” In this new world, I cannot think of a greater need than such a machine.

So we press on. Where life does not provide a lesson, a theme, or a thread, perhaps the year in film will offer one. Beyond that, however, the Year in Review gives us a chance to reflect on and celebrate a bounty of wonderful movies and experiences. It is about the moments, the quotes, the performances, and the films that will stick with us as the calendar pages flip. Last Cinema Standing will spend the next week diving into all of that and more, but first, I wanted to share a few highlights from a year in moviegoing.

Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s Raw screened as part of the Film Society’s New Directors, New Films Festival, and it was a treat, indeed. Ducournau and star Garance Marillier stayed for a fabulous question-and-answer session afterward, during which a woman in the audience stood and angrily confronted the director. She wondered why such a film even needs to exist then stormed out of the theater. Ducournau merely smirked and continued undeterred. There must be a perverse pleasure in making a film that upsets someone to such a degree but nevertheless compels her to sit through the whole thing.

In April, the QUAD Cinema, one of those great old New York City art-house theaters, after a years-long renovation and change of hands, re-opened as a cinephile’s dream. Apart from its wonderful selection of first-run films, the operators have dedicated the QUAD to becoming the premier repertory theater in the city. As part of that mission, the programmers present the First Encounters series, in which notable figures in the film world choose films they have never seen, watch them with an audience and react.

I was fortunate to attend the inaugural event, at which writer-director-actor Greta Gerwig presented David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. A few days later, John Turturro was on hand for a viewing of Satyajit Ray’s world cinema masterwork Pather Panchali. To see a great or interesting film anew through the eyes of one who has never seen it is among the true joys of cinema – this is why we share our favorite movies with our friends – and to experience that with professionals who are also endlessly knowledgeable and boundless in the depth of their love for the form, well, that is just the icing on the cake.

In September, the Lincoln Center screened Spike Lee’s Crooklyn as the inaugural One Film, One New York selection, an initiative to unite the city under the banner of a single moviegoing experience. The film was shown for free around the city, and Lee appeared at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan and the BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn with New York Times film critic AO Scott to discuss his quintessentially New York film. My fiancée and I waited three hours in the rain to hear Mr. Lee’s thoughts, and he did not disappoint. Spike, as ever, was Spike – equal parts prickly, confrontational, and humble, but always damn right.

The following month came the New York Film Festival, where we attended a screening of Sean Baker’s lovely ode to the resilience and spirit of childhood, The Florida Project. Baker was joined onstage afterward by his co-writer and the stars of the film, including the 7-year-old scene-stealer Brooklynn Prince, who if she so chooses could feature in everything from now until the sun burns out and that would be just fine.

Eight years ago, I called Carter Burwell the best composer working in Hollywood, an opinion that has not wavered. Last month, I got the chance to tell him so when he was on hand for a screening of Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. Long stretches of the film are carried only by music, and Burwell once again proves up to the task. In discussion, he proved worthy of admiration not only for his talent but for his kindness and generosity,

I could go on all day like this, and if you catch me in conversation, there is always the chance I will, but let’s wrap it up with this: In May, I attended the Film Society’s Chaplin Award Gala, where Robert De Niro was honored for his contributions to the cinema. It was about this time the current administration was elbow-deep in its attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, among other arts programs.

It was a wonderful evening, filled with humorous, heartfelt speeches from folks like Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and Martin Scorsese, who ultimately presented De Niro with the award. But the highlight surely was De Niro, who could not pass up the opportunity to stand up and speak for artists and art everywhere in a speech that spoke to the very core of why we were all there that night.

“Everyone knows Chaplin was a great artist, but he made his movies to entertain. It was only later that they became art,” De Niro said. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of our government’s hostility towards art. The budget proposal, among its other draconian cuts to life-saving and life-enhancing programs, eliminates the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For their own devices and political purposes, the administration suggests that the money for these all-inclusive program goes to the rich, liberal elite. This is what they now call an alternative fact. I call it what it is — bullshit.”

Bullshit it was, and bullshit it remains. If there is a lesson, a theme, or a meaning to be taken from the chaos of the past year, it is this: Art will not be silenced, and each of the extraordinary writers, directors, and performers contributing to the cinema is evidence of that fact. So we press on.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review, in which we will look back at the year that was cinema through the best moments, best quotes, best performances, and best films of the past 12 months. Check back each day this week for a new entry. Tomorrow: Top 10 Moments.

Taxi Driver: Still dangerous, still remarkable 40 years later

Harvey Keitel (left to right), Michael Phillips, Paul Schrader, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Kent Jones gathered for a 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at the Tribeca Film Festival. (photo credit: Getty Images)

The day Taxi Driver opened, Feb. 8, 1976, screenwriter Paul Schrader went to a theater across town and saw a line around the corner still as the first showing was to begin. He worried something had gone wrong with the projector or, god forbid, the print. He asked the girl working at the theater what all those people were doing there. She told him they were here for Taxi Driver. He asked if it had not already started, and she said they were lined up for the next showing.

“I walked up [into] the theater,” said Schrader. “It was the very first screening in New York, and the cab pulls out of the steam, and it says ‘Taxi Driver,’ and people in the audience applaud. The film had never been projected before. It was some kind of New York groundswell that just was there.”

To this story, director Martin Scorsese responded: “Incredible. I had no idea. None.”

The scene outside the Beacon Theatre

So went the 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper-West Side of Manhattan. Robert De Niro pulled together a reunion of the filmmakers behind the cinematic classic as one of the centerpieces of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded. Onstage were Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, producer Michael Phillips, and moderator Kent Jones, who is program director of the New York Film Festival.

The overwhelming feeling of the moment was awe – from an audience with a group of legendary actors and filmmakers assembled before them and from those onstage who still seemed stunned their little film found any success at all.

“What I saw [in the script], I can’t articulate,” said Scorsese. “It just had to be done, that’s all. I think Bob and I, we never really spoke about meaning or theory of any kind. Paul is the one who expresses it. I just had a kind of determination to make it, and I said earlier, I didn’t think it was a film that anybody was going to see. I felt it was just made out of the passion of the situation.”

That passion drips down the screen. It explodes out of the speakers. It demands your attention even when the only thing on screen is an empty hallway, one of the film’s many signature shots. On the big screen, the steam seems to pour out into the theater, and characters that have become larger than life through pop culture and critical appreciation feel more real but still larger than life. This is how this film was meant to be seen – in a packed house with that gorgeous yet ominous Bernard Herrmann score booming throughout the auditorium.

“It’s part of being in the city at night in the summer,” said Scorsese. “You can feel it in the film, Michael Chapman’s photography. You can get a sense of – you can taste – you can taste the humidity, and you can taste the sense of sometimes a kind of anger and violence that was emanating from the streets themselves. It was crazy.”

The city is nothing like that anymore. One imagines that is for the best. The world Taxi Driver depicts feels divorced from reality, like a metaphor for something darker in the human experiment, and it is those things, too, but to a person, the filmmakers assured us life in the city was like that and that people like Travis Bickle and worse were all around.

“When I read it, I identified with it, as I think we all did,” said De Niro. “Even though Marty’s from the heart of New York, I’m from the heart of New York, not far from each other in Manhattan, we just identified with the character.”

Ultimately, the character is the film, as is De Niro’s remarkable, terrifying performance. Pop culture, in some ways, has reduced Travis to a Mohawk and “Are you talkin’ to me?” However, when you see the performance again, in its proper context, it is hard to imagine a more thorough examination of psychosis, of a man on the brink of madness, capable of committing any number of terrible acts, and just waiting for the moment to strike.

“This script began in the best possible way,” said Schrader. “It began as a kind of self-therapy. There was a person who I was afraid of, who I was afraid of becoming, and that person was the taxi driver, and I felt like if I wrote about him, I could distance him from me, and it worked. … After 40 years, that therapeutic power is still imbued in the film.”

A film written as therapy, made out of necessity, depicting a hellscape at the heart of the American soul, one understands the filmmakers’ bafflement at its success. When it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Scorsese got wind the jury president, Tennessee Williams, was not a fan. Believing they had no chance to win, Scorsese and the cast did their required interviews and promotions, got on a plane, and came back home.

Phillips stayed behind to represent the film just in case. Well, just in case arrived and the film was announced as the winner of the Palme d’Or, the highest award of the festival and one of the highest honors in all filmmaking. To his shock, Phillips said, when he went onstage to accept the award, half the audience celebrated. The other half booed. After Phillips told the story, Scorsese just shook his head.

Jones, attempting to save the evening from that somewhat downer ending, offered: “Well, the film got the last laugh.”

With that, the assembled legends stood, clasped hands, and took a bow. Forty years and an ocean away from that divided audience in Cannes, hundreds of film lovers had gathered to show their appreciation for a work of pure genius. As the wild cheers of a grateful crowd echoed through the room, the truth was plain for anyone to see. Yeah, the film got the last laugh.

Taxi Driver Week: De Niro, Scorsese, the collaboration

Welcome to Taxi Driver Week at Last Cinema Standing, a week-long celebration of Martin Scorsese's bruising, beautiful modern classic in honor of the film's 40th anniversary and a special screening as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

There are a few keystone actor-director collaborations in cinema history – Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune; Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni; John Ford and John Wayne; Woody Allen and Diane Keaton; Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart; and Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Those six collaborations account for at least 15 of the greatest films ever made. In each case, the artist is great as an individual, but something about their work together brings out the best in each.

Thousands of pages have been filled and tens of thousands of words spilled on all of these pairs, Scorsese-De Niro more than most. Without wanting to be just another leaf on the forest floor, I have to say it is impossible to consider Taxi Driver without looking at it in the context of its director and star’s shared body of work. From 1973 to 1995, they made eight films together, several modern masterpieces, others misunderstood classics, and one underappreciated gem that almost destroyed Scorsese.

Mean Streets (1973)

Their first film working together featured De Niro in a supporting role as the loose-cannon gambler friend of Harvey Keitel’s low-level mafia figure. Mean Streets features all the major themes they would revisit time and again in their careers – crime, the everyday violence that infects people’s lives, the push and pull of religious belief, and the brutality and barbarism of men. Before this, Scorsese had made just two features as a director, and De Niro had appeared in a handful of films, garnering some acclaim for his performance in Bang the Drum Slowly. After, both artists flourished.

Taxi Driver (1976)

By the time they reunited, De Niro had won his first Academy Award for his role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, and Scorsese had proved he could step outside the crime genre with the wonderfully subdued and insightful Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, for which Ellen Burstyn won the Oscar for Best Actress. Both men were clearly in a groove, and with Paul Schrader’s magnificent script in hand, they made the first of the three stone-cold masterpieces they would make together.

For all of the film’s sinister, lurid atmosphere, it features one scene that stands out as particularly daft, in which a psychotic man with a gun sits in the back of Travis Bickle’s cab outside his wife’s lover’s apartment. The psychotic man is played by Scorsese in his first credited onscreen role, though he had appeared uncredited in three of his previous features.

The scene is mostly ad-libbed by Scorsese, who as a director is trying to get a rise out of De Niro and as an actor just keeps piling on the gory details of the violence he plans for his cheating wife. De Niro barely moves, shifting his eyes slightly to view the man through his rearview mirror, but he never engages him. Travis is a man on the edge, and here, he meets a man who has clearly gone over the edge, and the sequence is deeply disturbing as we witness the kind of monster Travis could easily become.

New York, New York (1977)

There is really no way around saying this – by this point in his career, Scorsese had developed a drug problem. It did not interfere with his work so much as it interfered with his personal life. The film is an intentionally stylish and artificial ode to classic Hollywood musicals and features De Niro as a saxophone player who falls in love with a singer played by Liza Minelli.

It was a box-office flop – earning $13 million on a $14 million budget – and many critics were put off by the artifice of the whole enterprise, failing to grasp the intent behind it. Probably best known today for its title song, made popular by Frank Sinatra, New York, New York is often regarded as a rare misfire by Scorsese, but that assessment ignores the movie’s greatest virtue as the document of a filmmaker truly in love with film.

Raging Bull (1980)

Indisputably one of the greatest films of all time, it is the peak of both artists’ careers, though it might be more fair to characterize it as a plateau for Scorsese, who in 36 years since has rarely come down much from these heights. It is also the film Scorsese credits with saving his life. After the failure of New York, New York, Scorsese’s drug addiction spiraled out of control, ultimately landing him in the hospital.

While Scorsese was bedridden, De Niro brought him the story of Jake La Motta. The director was unsure if he had the energy or creative passion to make another film, but De Niro insisted. In bringing the rise and fall of La Motta to the screen, Scorsese found an outlet for all the rage and frustration that had built up inside him over the years. He found the creative spirit that had left him in his drugged-out haze. And he found the will to shoot one of the most devastating portraits of a man at war with himself ever put to celluloid.

Meanwhile, De Niro dug deeper than he ever had to find the heart of a man who is by turns disgusting and pitiable. He became the character as no other actor has ever accomplished. Much of course has been made of De Niro’s physical transformation – into the boxer first, then the bloated shell of a man later – but more impressive than that is De Niro’s spiritual transformation. He takes on the soul of La Motta in a way that is terrifying, dangerous, and awe inspiring.

The King of Comedy (1982)

A comedy in the loosest sense of the word, Scorsese has said numerous times this is his favorite performance of De Niro’s. As wannabe comedian Rupert Pupkin, the actor is the simpering embodiment of the Me Generation, a self-actualized, self-important, self-assured blowhard who believes he has everything coming to him because he deserves it.

Scorsese had delved into the dark heart of man before but never with the sharp-edged sword of satire he carried into The King of Comedy. The film has only grown scarier and more honest with time, serving equally well as a rebuke of the current selfie-obsessed, fame-hungry generation and their forebears who clearly suffered the same egomania, a fact they seem all too ready to forget.

Goodfellas (1990)

Feeling they had reached the virtual limit of their artistic collaboration, Scorsese and De Niro parted ways for much of the 1980s, during which time Scorsese made the dark comedy After Hours, the sports film The Color of Money, and the still controversial The Last Temptation of Christ. De Niro went off and made other great films such as Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, and Midnight Run. But it took another masterpiece to bring them back together.

If The Godfather is the mafia as an allegory for the promise of the American Dream and family loyalty, then Goodfellas is a gritty examination of the machinery that powers that dream. It is about the mafia as a business, where money is king. To quote Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the ethos is: “Fuck you. Pay me.” De Niro appears in a supporting role as Jimmy Conway, the lifelong hustler who loves the action and the money. Of course, none of it can last. American Dream or not, everyone eventually wakes up.

Cape Fear (1991)

The only remake in the Scorsese canon until he finally won an Oscar for The Departed, this was an ideal project for someone like Scorsese to take on. It does not achieve the same brilliance as its predecessor, a quintessential film noir that stood out as uniquely dark in its time (1962), but Scorsese has no trouble imposing his vision on the material and making the implied horror of the original more explicit.

De Niro takes on the role of Max Cady, originated by Robert Mitchum, an ex-con out for revenge on the defense lawyer who failed to keep him out of prison (played here by Nick Nolte, taking over for Gregory Peck). If there is a weak spot in the Scorsese-De Niro oeuvre this is probably it, but its virtue lies in its commitment to the dirty, disturbing deeds it shows and its argument that no one – neither tormentor nor tormented – is without sin.

Casino (1995)

Their final collaboration thus far, Casino has been accused of being something of a rehash of Goodfellas, but while it carries many of the same beats, it features a totally different rhythm. De Niro is Ace Rothstein, a professional hustler handed the keys to a kingdom. A man who is always in control of his own wants and desires, he wants total control over his world as well, but those closest to him lack his sense of restraint and burn the whole empire to the ground.

One hopes these two brilliant artists find their way back to each other – they of course are good friends, and rumors swirl constantly of a ninth collaboration – but if Casino stands as their final work together, it is a fitting capstone. It features all of Scorsese’s typical preoccupations – all those things we mentioned back in Mean Streets – and a De Niro performance that proves subtly captivating and stands up well alongside his best work.

Both men obviously found great success outside their working relationship, and it is probably for the best the collaboration ended before it was allowed to become stale or repetitive. However, when the modern history of film is written, scholars will talk about the work of three different artists – Scorsese, De Niro, and the unparalleled output of both men together.

Last Cinema Standing presents: Taxi Driver Week

Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was released Feb. 8, 1976. Three month later, Scorsese won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Less than a year after that, it was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Now, 40 years on, its place as one of the greatest films ever made is set in stone. It is an unimpeachable classic that still has the power to shock, disturb, and provoke.

To commemorate this landmark achievement and in anticipation of a special 40th anniversary screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, Last Cinema Standing is devoting this week to Taxi Driver. We will have a number of features and reflections over the next several days, all culminating in our coverage of the anniversary screening, where Scorsese, stars Robert De Niro, Jodi Foster, and Cybill Shepherd, and screenwriter Paul Schrader will gather to discuss the film.

This will be an opportunity to look back through the modern history of cinema, of which Taxi Driver is an integral part. We will analyze the film’s legacy and lasting influence, the controversy surrounding its depictions of violence and insanity, and the ways it has seeped into our cultural consciousness. My hope is we will have a lot of fun along the way, too.

Taxi Driver is among my favorite films of all time – there were several years where I would have put it right at the top of the list – and I could not be more excited to see the cast and filmmakers present it on the big screen. If I can translate even a fraction of the joy I take in discussing and viewing this film into the words I write in this space, it will be worth it. So please, join me here over the next few days as we dive into one of the undisputed treasures of cinema.

New movie review: Joy

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Joy in writer-director David O. Russell's new film Joy.

Joy Mangano is a smart, industrious woman who has made a fortune inventing and selling practical products for everyday people. Her two most famous inventions are the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangers, the latter of which is the highest selling product in the history of the Home Shopping Network. Mangano is a brand unto herself, and in interviews and on television, she comes across as someone excited to share her ideas with people and still a little baffled, two decades on, at the enormity of her success.

That version of Mangano does not really make an appearance in writer-director David O. Russell’s Joy, which takes the bare bones of the true-life story and adds in other true stories and flights of fancy from Russell. The result is a film that always seems on the verge of spinning out of control, and the only reason it does not is because of the fantastic central performance by Jennifer Lawrence holding everything together.

Lawrence plays Russell’s version of Mangano, though in the film, she is known only as Joy and never given a last name. Joy is a divorced, single mother of two, whose mother (Virginia Madsen) lives upstairs and whose ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez) lives in the basement. When the movie begins, her father (Robert De Niro) also moves into the basement. These are contrivances to set up the idea of a woman who feels trapped by her circumstances and just needs the right motivation or idea to break out of it.

You will not have much trouble picking up on this, but if you miss it, Russell lays it out for the audience with a children’s science book about cicadas, which can hide underground for up to 17 years. Joy points out what a random number this is, particularly as it matches the length of time she has kept the entrepreneur and innovator inside herself hidden. Get it? The film trades throughout in this kind of heavy-handed symbolism, which never builds to any coherent thematic idea. They are just thoughts floating around until Russell likes one enough to employ it.

Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Joy.

When Joy decides to come out of hiding, it is with her newest invention – the Miracle Mop. Sparked by sudden inspiration, she takes to her daughter’s room and sketches out the initial designs in crayon. She builds it, finds investors, and sets about selling the new product door to door and parking lot to parking lot. Her ex-husband, who is also her best friend, suggests a meeting with his old school chum (Bradley Cooper) who works at a new kind of television channel: QVC.

At this point, the movie starts going through the motions of telling a classic rags-to-riches story, complete with a second mortgage, a failed first attempt to sell the mop, threatened bankruptcy, and a last-ditch effort to save her company, her invention, her home, and her family. There is some business about a patent dispute – as there is with just about every film about an inventor or an invention – but even while integral to the plot, it seems peripheral to the storytelling. Russell just does not seem to know what kind of movie he wants to make.

This is perhaps because it was not Russell’s story to begin with. Annie Mumolo, the Oscar-nominated co-writer of Bridesmaids, developed the story for her own original screenplay, which stuck more closely to the details of Mangano’s life. When Russell came onto the project, he added enough of his ideas and changed enough of the script to get a co-story credit and sole writing credit, which is fine, and Joy feels very much like a Russell movie.

Let’s imagine for a second, though, a world in which Mumolo’s original script is made by a strong, independent-minded female filmmaker – say, Sarah Polley. Maybe in that world, Joy is a film with the guts to tell the straight story of a brilliant female inventor who has a plan, works hard, and achieves success. Maybe in that world, it is a film filled with rich female characters, all with their own inner lives and motivations. Maybe in that world, the film is a great work of art that says something interesting about women’s place in society and in business in particular.

Instead, we live in this world, in which Russell has attached superfluous genre tropes to his filmmaking, populated the edges of his story with grotesque female caricatures, and failed to say anything meaningful about Joy’s place in the culture. Ultimately, Russell’s film is a lot of smoke and no fire with one clear exception – Lawrence.

At 25 years old, Lawrence is a world-famous star, an Academy Award-winning actress, and a giant box-office draw. She also has been the lead of only about a dozen or so feature films, something that is easy to forget given her cultural ubiquity. She is still learning and growing just about every time she steps in front of a camera, and in Joy, she delivers her best work yet. She may not be portraying the real-life Mangano, who was almost 15 years older than Lawrence during the events depicted, but she is certainly channeling that woman’s inner strength and intelligence.

The film around her may be a muddle, but there is nothing confused about Lawrence’s performance. It is an aspirational character, the kind more actresses deserve the chance to play and the kind more young girls deserve the chance to go to the movies and see. Lawrence makes the most of the shamefully rare opportunity to show a bright, powerful woman, and her work is a sight to behold, worth the price of admission on its own. Unfortunately, the movie simply does not live up to that standard.

See it? No.