It’s getting less attention right now than movies with Jedi or cowboys or bear attacks, but one of the most exciting films hitting theaters in time for Christmas is “Joy,” starring Jennifer Lawrence as a single mother and entrepreneur battling to make her mark on the world. And one of the reasons it’s so exciting is that it’s the latest movie from director David O. Russell.
It’s the eighth movie credited to Russell (there’s a ninth, as we’ll see, of murkier origins) across his 21-year career, and he’s had one of the more fascinating ones in modern cinema. Breaking out with comedy “Spanking The Monkey” in 1994, Russell came up alongside Tarantino and co., but has always marched to the beat of his own drum, with a distinctly vibrant, fleet-footed comedy vibe.
Early in his career, he got something of a reputation as an enfant terrible, thanks to well-publicized on-set blow-outs with A-list stars, including the infamous leaked “I Heart Huckabees” confrontations with star Lily Tomlin. But Russell’s reinvented himself spectacularly: after a six-year gap following the middlingly-received ‘Huckabees,’ he returned with “The Fighter” in 2010, the first of three films in the space of four years that were both huge commercial successes and adored by critics and awards-givers alike.
He’s revered by actors (even some of the ones he’s had screaming matches with), Jennifer Lawrence has vowed to work with him forever, and his last three movies saw eleven actors earn Oscar nominations, and three of them take home the prize. But he’s also one of the rare filmmakers to make comedy visually exciting and genuinely artful, even if he’s not always to everyone’s taste.
With “Joy” beginning to screen (early word: it’s good!), and hitting theaters on Christmas Day, it seemed to be a good time to take stock of Russell’s remarkable career. So below, we’ve ranked his films to date from worst to best, though in this case, those are relative terms: all but the bottom one or two are terrific, and even those have much to recommend them. Take a look below, and let us know if you agree in the comments.
8. “Accidental Love” (2015)
It’s perhaps unfair to include “Accidental Love” on a list of David O. Russell’s movies: it went out under a different title (it was originally called “Nailed”), without his approval, and it’s not even credited to him, instead getting a belated release of a sort this year, with “Stephen Greene” credited as director. The filming began in 2008, suffered through a stop-start production due to financing difficulties through disgraced producer David Bergstein, and Russell and his producers eventually walked away from the project entirely. As such, one certainly shouldn’t give Russell too much blame for the finished movie, which is pretty dire, and wasn’t ultimately assembled by him, and includes a tiny amount of material he didn’t shoot, and one comes away with a newfound respect for the way he can elevate material. At the same time, though, it’s a little hard to look at the material and see this ranking anywhere near the director’s best work even if it hadn’t been so badly compromised. Jessica Biel stars as Alice, a roller-waitress, shot in the head with a nail gun just as her beau (James Marsden) proposes. Doctors won’t operate because she doesn’t have healthcare, and so Alice (who’s become a more sexual, impulsive being as a result of her brain injury) heads to Washington, hooking up with youthful congressman Jake Gyllenhaal, and starting a campaign for those afflicted by unusual conditions, including Tracy Morgan as a man with an anal prolapse. Knowing how different its rhythms are from Russell’s movies, particularly his later ones, one certainly laments the looser version that we might have seen, as the unimaginative editing job done here by the backers gives an airlessness to much of the comedy, though it’s possible to see where it might have once been funny in theory, and the cast seem to mostly be doing good work, particularly Biel and Marsden. And the now-dated nature of the subject matter, in a post-Obamacare age, doesn’t help. But as is so often the case with big-screen satire, it often comes across as clunky and heavy-handed, so broad and uneven that its targets usually escape, and with an oddly juvenile approach to sex. It’s perhaps notable (though it’s possibly just down to the difficulties of its release) that it’s the only Russell film he doesn’t have a writing credit on: ultimately, the material seems sort of beneath him. Perhaps the film’s tortured post-production process, and the director disowning it, ended up making it a dodged bullet…