Writers: Rachel Mason and Jack Thorne
Director: Ben Taylor
Co-written by Rachel Mason and Jack Thorne, Joy is everything you would expect from a period British film in which plucky underdogs overcome adversity and a lack of faith in them from the Establishment to change the world. So Joy follows a pattern we have seen countless times before – a small troop of underdog soldiers overcome the enemy in a miraculous victory, a small group of underdog journalists break a major scandal and, here, a small group of underdog scientists overcome a lack of funding and nationwide morality objections to create the first IVF baby. Mason and Thorne’s film directed by Ben Taylor is no less enjoyable for the predictability of its story-mapping but expect plenty of cliches as it aims to celebrate the plucky heroism of its protagonists and heroically restore Jean Purdy to the history of fertility research.
Keen to be part of his laboratory, Jean applies for a position with Dr Robert Edwards and soon becomes essential to his experiments. When they both convince surgeon Patrick Steptoe to join them, a programme of fertility study begins extracting eggs from infertile women and hoping to help them conceive. But as the years go by, the funders refuse to support their work despite promising results and the media, fearful of the consequences, label Edwards as Dr Frankenstein, but the team persist.
Joy has a number of narrative strands that run alongside the history of fertility research including the backstory of how the team came together, the effect on the women participating in the programme’s many rounds of failure and the story of Jean herself, her own religious beliefs and the family sacrifices and endometriosis diagnosis that prevents her own conception. In this 110-minute film there isn’t quite enough time to do all of these narratives justice and, although their names and emotional and biological trials are acknowledged, more on the impact of these failures on the women who participated would deepen the human connection in the film.
Instead, the focus is squarely on the science and the scientists, and there are many shots of people looking thorughfully into microscopes, shuffling test tubes around and having eureka moments. But the film does recognise the long process of failure over eight years of sustained attempts, out of which innovation and discovery can grow. The baddies here are the Medical Research Council (MRC) – still in existence today – who couldn’t see the potential and refused to fund it, and the media who are referenced in dialogue rather than shown. It adds jeopardy when needed – as if the pain of reproductive uncertainty didn’t contain enough life and death agony.
There are expected performances from Thomasin McKenzie as the sweetly hopeful Jean channelling her own private pain, James Norton as Edwards who sticks to his methods and Bill Nighy as Steptoe who brings his usual melancholy gravity. Joy is a cosy and entertaining film with lots to recommend it and while it doesn’t attempt to revolutionise the period drama as Steve McQueen has with Blitz, there is comfort in Joy delivering exactly what you expect it to.
Joy is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
