Miracle Mops and lightbulb moments: a ‘Joy’ feature

New Year, new broom. Or rather mop in the case of Jennifer Lawrence, as her latest movie Joy rolls into cinemas. She takes the role of entrepreneurial dynamo Joy (based on Joy Mangano), inventor of a revolutionary cleaning product that carries her to fame on a sea of elbow grease.

It doesn’t sound like something that’ll polish off the competition at the box office, yet one look at the roster of talent involved suggests this isn’t the film you might expect, directed as it is by one of the ultimate left-field helmers, David O Russell.

In Hollywood, the best offerings are usually those with the best ideas, and as innovative personalities are all about snappy concepts they make perfect camera fodder for the moviemaking machine.

So join us on the path to enlightenment as we bring you some of celluloid’s best thinkers from outside the box. Here you’ll find names that took established convention and kicked its boring old butt up to the next level. Figures from across history who risked ridicule, and in some cases electrocution. And, most importantly for our purposes, trailblazers given an extra spark by having some of the world’s greatest stars portraying them…

NIKOLA TESLA (Born 1856)

Christopher Nolan‘s moody period tale of battling magicians (from the novel by Christopher Priest) wasn’t afraid to bring real people into the mix to give its evocative style more heft. Here the maverick physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla lent his advice to Hugh Jackman‘s embittered conjuror Angier.

Tying this appearance into the story’s themes of science and illusion, Nolan cleverly cast iconic spaceboy David Bowie as the Serbian American alternating current-wrangler. The film depicted Tesla’s dangerous experiments in electricity, but his main role here was in the field of the fantastical, and Bowie straddled this idea perfectly.

Not only was he making waves in the area of wireless technology, he wound up foreshadowing Star Trek by developing a teleport device. This had the bizarre side effect of duplicating its test subjects, with decidedly hatty and catty results.

GEORGE MÉLIÈS (Born 1861)

These days the art of wizardry in film is typically relegated to the latest crop of CGI dinosaurs. However the sense of enchantment that made people fall in love with the medium in the first place is down to the likes of Georges Méliès, played here by Ben Kingsley in Martin Scorsese‘s eye-popping 3D extravaganza Hugo.

The movie joins him in his advancing years, as Asa Butterfield‘s title moppet discovers him running a shop during his mystery-laden quest involving a mechanical man. Hugo goes on to find out more about Méliès’ past, beautifully realized by top cineaste Scorsese with writers Brian Selznick and John Logan.

Like Tesla in The Prestige, Méliès had a healthy respect for the interaction between magic and machinery. His legacy of innovation in special effects and storytelling within the medium is immeasurable.

MARIE CURIE (Born 1867)

Hollywood in the 1940s was an unlikely platform for a movie about a pioneering woman of science, but nonetheless Greer Garson took on the part in Madame Curie. Playing opposite regular co-star Walter Pidgeon as Pierre Curie, the product was sold more on their personal chemistry than the sort that went on in the laboratory.

Mervyn LeRoy directed from a script worked on by no less a scribe than Brave New World‘s Aldous Huxley. The film follows Curie from her student days through to her groundbreaking discoveries concerning radiation, such as the process of radioactivity and the element polonium.

On a distinctly unscientific note, Curie was portrayed forty-odd years later as the girlfriend of a legendary yet heavily-reimagined physicist in Young Einstein, an Australian comedy written and directed by Yahoo Serious!

ALAN TURING (Born 1912)

Benedict Cumberbatch took his patented lonely genius persona to a whole new level in this critically-lauded biopic of codebreaker Alan Turing. Though it’s easy to look at Turing as a singular figure, he was of course part of the immensely hard-working team at Bletchley Park during World War II.

Morten Tyldum lined the lenses on the extraordinary story of how Turing helped to unlock the secrets of the notorious Nazi Enigma machine by building the forerunner of the modern day computer. Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore also explored Turing’s sexuality, which was to lead to tragic consequences.

This chronicle of whirring gears, overheated minds and great British pluck in the face of disaster became a deserved hit. While, like many movies of its type, it didn’t strictly stick to the facts, it was a fitting tribute to Turing and his colleagues.

JOY MANGANO (Born 1956)

At first glance it’s difficult to see what is cinematic or compelling about Joy Mangano, the one-woman business titan who made her fortune off the back of dirt-busting inventions like the Miracle Mop. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a subject as worthy as any of the other illustrious names on this list.

Often the people who become pioneers do so unencumbered by family, but not in Joy’s case. The film finds her living in cramped conditions with not only her kids and relatives, but also her ex-husband. It isn’t long before she devises a way of getting out and establishing a reputation, and it’s this that director David O Russell and co-writer Annie Mumolo saw as the perfect starting point for a classic (if semi-fictionalized) tale.

This isn’t a TV-movie-of-the-week-style production and Russell is no regular megaphone-wielder. He’s brought in the mighty Jennifer Lawrence as Joy, and if you think that’s enough wallop on the acting front, check out the supporting cast… Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini and Robert De Niro as her father.

Thanks to Lawrence’s typically strong performance, filtered through Russell’s offbeat lens, it looks like Joy will quite literally be brought to audiences seeking something different from the umpteenth viewing of Star Wars. It’s out in cinemas now and is sure to clean up.

Check out the trailer for the movie here.