Joy

At its best, Hollywood packages our aspirations and sells them back to us with celebrities as our proxies. Last year's holiday release, "Joy," is a tightly wrapped bento box of the American Dream, but there's a twist. The dreamer is a woman. For the conservative investors of Hollywood, this is a radical move.

In recent years the writer, producer and director David O. Russell has honed the art of taking a genre piece that is a little bit larger than life and adding just enough working class realism in it to give it some gravitas. We see this particularly in "The Fighter," "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." He's also found a guaranteed team of collaborators: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. His latest venture is a capitalist, family fantasy in the style of Frank Capra and "It's a Wonderful Life."

Jennifer Lawrence plays Joy, a brilliant inventor who rises up from the bottom with no prospects and very little education to found a business dynasty on the QVC, a precursor to the Home Shopping Network. But she has plenty of obstacles on her way to the top. Most of them involve her family -- her emotionally needy, passive-aggressive father Robert De Niro, her delusional and terrified mother Virginia Madsen, her spiteful, jealous sister Elisabeth R�hm and her wonderfully supportive grandmother Diane Ladd.

She makes the huge mistake of falling in love, getting married and having children. Tony (�dgar Ram�rez) is an excellent partner and friend, but a terrible husband who believes that practicality should never stand in the way of your fantasies -- so they quickly divorce.

Everyone wants something from Joy, and just when her family pushes this nurturer too far, she finds a way to involve them all in a business venture that will help them all make their dreams come true. She rises to amazing heights, then plummets to rock bottom and rises back up again in this loosely biographical comedy of unforgiving commerce.

Special features on this Blu-ray include a substantial featurette, where David O. Russell explains his thought process and how the story came about, a gallery and a "Times Talk" interview with Jennifer Lawrence and Russell. In this, they talk about the revolution of having a female protagonist and ramble in other tangents for over an hour.

"Joy"
Blu-ray
$29.99
www.foxmovies.com/movies/joy