Joy is a film which is honest in the portrayal of what it takes to become greatly successful in this world, and how the finish line in the race towards finding success is only the starting line of a different set of complications. It’s enjoyable to see a film that does not pre-suppose its audience to be children who today are apparently not allowed to see what the real world has in store for them. Mr. David O. Russell is realistic: he depicts a woman who had potential at perhaps making things for others never really release it into a hot air balloon for an upward rise in fortune. She is only mildly resentful of the life she has made for herself at the age of 25: divorced with two children, a bottom-barrel job, living at home with a mother adopted to soap operas and a father who separated owning a body shop with never an offer to help his daughter using his own business means. Inspiration strikes her to the point that this is the time to fulfill what she was born to be. It is not simply because she is an unemployed single mother in a dysfunctional family, but that there is some mystical reason of her betraying her dreams for settling for mediocre that creates this burning desire.

Can a woman be a successful entrepreneur? Absolutely, so long as they have the foreknowledge that they will fail terribly and that perseverance is their only chance. To persevere until fortune beings to favor oneself; this is not to say that one becomes wealthy through luck, but through an intense sequence of calculated decisions to arrive oneself at the right place at the right time. And again, when this occurs in the narrative of the successful entrepreneur determines how much failure he, or she in this case, had to endure. The idea of the overnight success is simply a wish, just as one may wish to way lose 10 pounds by tomorrow. And in Joy’s instance with her mop, with the difficulties in finding a retailer, then selling it through the retailer, and even further through claims of ownership first on the product and then on the company by her father and half-sister, it merely signifies the level of risk an entrepreneur faces when deciding to make something from nothing. It also indicates how many others, unwilling to step into the unknown which can potentially ruin their families and force themselves into bankruptcy, clamor to have a portion of what was made, through theft or otherwise.