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‘Joy’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Bill Nighy Fight the System to Pioneer IVF in a Crowd-Pleasing Medical Biopic
Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Bill Nighy and James Norton, Ben Taylor's 'Joy' depicts the medical struggle to deliver the world's first in-vitro baby.
But joy is also the primary MO of this debut feature from British TV comedy director Ben Taylor(“Sex Education,” “Catastrophe”), which assigns itself the somewhat tricky task of fashioning an uplifting audience-pleaser from story material in which moments of elation are considerably outnumbered by those of crushing heartbreak. Jack Thorne’s script for “Joy” navigates this tonal challenge by focusing its narrative on a woman not undergoing the treatment, but heavily invested in it just the same: Jean Purdy, the young British nurse who joined an otherwise male-dominated fertility research team as an assistant in 1969, before becoming more integrally involved as an embryologist in the years leading up to Brown’s game-changing 1978 birth. Yet similar charges can be leveled at “Joy,” which is overly cursory in its treatment of these vulnerable lives — one mentions being a victim of domestic abuse and is never revisited, another is permitted a brief, stoic reaction shot to news of an ectopic pregnancy — but aims for collective catharsis as Purdy gathers them for one spirit-lifting montage of beachside revelry.
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