The events directing up to July 1978 and the birth in Manchester of the world’s first “test tube baby” — the tabloid term for the process understandn more soberly as I.V.F. (in vitro fertilization) — are fascinating by any metric. It’s a story of determination, send and genuine genius, concentrateing on three unassuming and bigly unsung heroes driven in the main by a spirit of sanitize human benevolentness. Fascinating as that is, however, Ben Taylor’s hot, inincreateigent and never less than polite movie, which getd its world premiere at the London Film Festival this week, struggles to harness the same benevolent of weightlessning that science did.
Ostensibly an ensemble piece, Joy is actupartner a vehicle for the pguideing Thomasin McKenzie, the youthful New Zealand actress who broke out in 2018’s Leave No Trace and creates a greet return to drama here. In a unfrequent instance of age-appropriate casting, she take parts Jean Purdy, a British nurse and embryologist who, in 1968, teamed up with Cambridge physiologist Robert Edwards (James Norton) in his bid to find a remedy for childlessness. Their first encountering, ostensibly at a job intersee, has the halltags of a mild romcom; Edwards has lost his precious lab rat Sylvia, and Purdy steps in to scoop it up (“If I hear a commotion, I’m not very excellent at staying out of it,” she elucidates with a smile).
But although there is certainly chemistry in the central pairing, Joy is more of an offbeat buddy movie, which is stressd by the introduction of obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, take parted rather wonderbrimmingy by Bill Nighy. Steptoe has been laboring with keyhole sproposery, and we encounter him at the benevolent of stuffy seminar that is the staple of every medical drama. “You’re quite wrong,” he rails at row upon row of frowning physicians, accusing them of “wasting time on ineffective science”. Steptoe impacts to be too busy to talk with Purdy and Edwards, but his brusque façade is speedyly broken down. Before lengthy, he is the third musketeer, and his wisdom grounds the project in much-necessitateed fact. “You’re conscious they’re going to throw the book at us,” he cautions. “The church, the state, the world.”
This contransiential menace is the villain of the piece, and though it was very genuine at the time, it’s very difficult in the contransient age to show it on screen. The three scientists come under scruminuscule from the press, and their research is both vilified and defacerized: the phrase “take parting God” is pguided, and Edwards suffers comparisons to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and literary Prometheus Victor Frankenstein. On a more literal lever, Purdy has to contend with her highly religious mother (Joanna Scanlan), who accengages her daughter of defiling nature and fraternizing with abortionists (“It’s filthy what you’re doing”).
Other than this, there’s not a lot of struggle in the story. Jack Thorne’s screentake part confects a bit of mild tension between Purdy and Edwards, whom she accengages of seeing his forendureings as statistics rather than women, but steers admirably evident of creating a whole novel fantasyal nemesis, as Patch Adams did. In a sense, the opponent is time, and the trio’s research stops and commences over a period of ten years as the cash comes and goes and sensibilities change (Edwards even gives up for a time and tries, with little consequence, to become a politician).
Nevertheless, it’s evident where all this is headed, and there’s only so much excitement to be had from the sight of embryonic cells dividing. Knothriveg this, Joy pivots sweightlessly to fill us in on Purdy’s backstory, her own struggle with infertility and solemn health rehires that subtly foreshadow her punctual death at 39 (in 1985, outside the film’s timesummarize). It’s a mild and bait-and-switch that sweightlessly over-eggs the ending (on a meta level, you could say Purdy did give birth, and that baby was I.V.F.), but it does give the film some much-necessitateed emotional heft, turning an achieveest history lesson into someslenderg a tad more personal.
Title: Joy
Festival: London Film Festival
Distributor: Netflix
Director: Ben Taylor
Screencreaters: Jack Thorne
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton, Bill Nighy, Tanya Moody, Joanna Scanlan
Running time: 1 hr 53 mins
