‘Joy’ (2024) Review: A Trio of Charming Brits Give Birth to IVF in Ben Taylor’s Too-Cheery Historical Drama

“Holy shit. Holy shit!” Robert Edwards (James Norton) shouts, signaling alarm to his fellow white-coats. Is it in response to a massive revelation in medicine? A breakthrough that would forever alter the future of reproductive science? Not quite; that comes a bit later in Ben Taylor’s Joy, the latest in Netflix’s long line of overlong historical dramas as heavy on country-specific whimsy as they are cutesy dramatics that make your eyes roll just as they tear up. Subtitled The Birth of IVF – or, in vitro fertilization, which Edwards and two fellow physiologists co-developed in the late 1970s – it’s clear from the jump that Joy will waste plenty of time endearing us to its characters while laying on heavy charm in order to lighten and/or dull its proceedings to a level half-watching homebodies can grasp. But at the start, its too-handsome lead has a problem on his hands: “Everyone, stop. Sylvia’s escaped, and I’d only just got her pregnant.” 

Of course, Sylvia is but a lab mouse at the center of an early-stage IVF experiment, not a human being trapped against their will. (That’s a different genre of film that Netflix is equally happy to produce.) And, as is only natural for a film as keen on droll dialogue as it is verifiable-if-minute details, she scampers into the clutches of Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), a kind lab manager applicant whose inability to stay out of a commotion lands her directly in Edwards’ lap, saving Sylvia and sending the two on a journey to find Dr. Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy, the most English thing about this production by a hair), even before Edwards explains to Purdy what exactly it is that they’ll be doing. When he finally gets around to it, it’s delivered as though the words “we’re going to cure childlessness” have been uttered hundreds of thousands of times before. Purdy takes his claim in stride, as though he’s suggested they hit a Dairy Queen on the way. In another picture, the line might stick out like a sore thumb. In Joy, it’s as commonplace as its subtitle is punny.

Perhaps a bit too much attention is being paid to the way Taylor’s film sounds as opposed to what it says about its depiction of this revolutionary scientific innovation’s birth, not to mention the impact it had on millions of families who otherwise would have spent their lives wondering why they were saddled with the inability to have children. Then again, that The Birth of IVF is performed and spoken like a children’s book adaptation – with an “Oogum Boogum Song” needle drop coming in the fourth minute to boot – just feels a bit off, staged to the point where the charm that would be the rising tide to raise all other boats is more of a distracting tidal wave in this setting. And yet… How else should this tale be told? With the grave detail of a thousand failed experiments that left mothers and fathers devastated and confused? 

Instead, the playwright Jack Thorne, whose film scripts range from 2020’s Rosamund Pike-starring Marie Curie biopic Radioactive to the upcoming Tron: Ares, goes for broke by going a bit too glib at points here, yet manages to infuse Joy with the sort of cheesiness that would cause a drama less committed to the cause to cave in on itself. Indeed, the film’s structural integrity suffers due to its insistence upon adhering to genre conventions, but who’s to say that the order of operations we’ve become familiar with throughout our viewing careers didn’t actually unfold as portrayed in lilty non-fiction tales like this one? Take, for instance, Steptoe’s initial hesitation to join Edwards and Purdy’s efforts despite having dedicated his career to the very science they’re trying to put into action, the very science that his contemporaries rejected long before they stumbled into a Medical Research Council lecture Steptoe has attended. Why would a man so hell-bent on bringing his published findings to life in the lab be so hesitant to join the efforts of the first two scientists willing to work with him? The proof may be in the pudding: They are the first two scientists willing to work with him, making him even less sure that his work will be worthwhile. 

Nevertheless, Steptoe latches onto Edwards and Purdy’s experiment after some convincing from the latter – cue Purdy asking, “You really are impossible, aren’t you?” and Edwards responding, “We’re making the impossible possible, Jean” – and that’s only how Joy’s first 12 minutes unfold. The rest of the film is far from experimental itself, sprinting from one operation to the next while grand speeches to skeptical audiences are inter-spliced throughout. This is done in what feels like a painstaking effort to counter its cheery aura with deniability, one that feels far more fitting of a drama about medical trailblazers than the film they are actually in. This, again, begs the question: If the film’s events did, indeed, happen as they are dramatized, who are we to criticize said dramatization? This time, we have an answer: When they feel as though they’ve been pulled directly from a Wikipedia page with little enhancement to develop a movie actually worth watching. 

This critic has taken up a vested interest in Wikipedia Cinema of late, not in the sense that it makes for an enjoyable viewing experience, but that it is astonishing how simple it is to get new entries made, almost as though there is a hidden assembly line churning them out at a dime-a-dozen pace that not even the hungriest streamers can keep up with. At least Joy isn’t a documentary, and therefore attempts to fill in the blanks its characters have in spades, particularly when it comes to Purdy. Edwards and Steptoe aren’t depicted as much more than two scientists with an interest in starting a revolution, despite the film’s half-assed stab at turning Edwards into a man whose work interferes with his desire to be with his family (a detail that gets just as lost in the slog that is much of Joy’s midsection as any other shred of personality these two men may have hidden somewhere in the depths of their souls). Purdy, meanwhile, has a moral conflict at the center of her individual plotline, as she’s not only someone fascinated with medical advancement, but a devout Christian whose church community rejects her work on the project. If it led her character down a half-interesting path, it might give Joy a bit more meat to its bones; it’s a shame that everything around Purdy’s internal journey is too focused on the facts to make anything else about her particularly interesting.

Underlyingly, that’s what befalls Joy at its core, and many other films like it. How films of its ilk should be handled isn’t much of a question these days, if only because of the structure they rely on – sojourns sojourning, only to hit a few roadblocks in the form of personal and/or professional tribulation along the way, all before achieving their goal either actively or posthumously, as is the case for two of the trio’s members here – is too fixed to ever be shaken. Sometimes, as Letterboxd’s George Fenwick wrote in his review, it’s okay for cinema to be “actors performing Wikipedia pages.” But the key word there is “sometimes.” We’re rapidly approaching the “always” territory, a dangerous realm that Joy dives into headfirst without a parachute. The problem isn’t so much that it’s happening. It’s that audiences, insofar as they exist for movies like Joy, seem to be willing to accept it.