Finding Joy | Review

More from the Garden State: De Rosa Searchs For Romantic Eccentricities

Director Carlo De Rosa’s debut feature is yet another addition to the long list of films about a down-on-his-luck guy who falls for a quirky girl who miraculously gets him out of his comfort zone and saves him from a life of loneliness. Finding Joy is plagued with cliches so much that it would be easy to refer to it as Garden State 2.0 or Seeking a Friend for the End of the World minus the imminent, probably redemptive, destruction of the planet. In fact, the two protagonists uncannily resemble Steve Carell and Keira Knightley. De Rosa desperately tries to create the illusion of having well-developed characters by adding random eccentricities to each one of the supporting roles.

The premise is basic. Kyle (Josh Cooke) is a writer who hasn’t found much success and must go back home when his world is crumbling down. Back at home he discovers that after he left his room was turned into a magnificent bathroom fountains included. He must now sleep in the bathtub while trying to finish his latest novel. Been there done that. As if this wasn’t uninventive enough, Kyle meets the next-door neighbor, Joy (Liane Balaban), of whom almost nothing is ever revealed to Kyle or the audience for that matter. It’s hard to know if any more details about her past would have helped the film at all.

Unsurprisingly they instantly get along. Joy believes she might die soon so she bestows onto Kyle the responsibility of writing her obituary, typical dating stuff for her one must assume. The eager and depress writer refuses, but then changes his mind and apologizes with a gesture of “Post-it” vandalism on her car (probably the most ingenious moment in the films). The strange, unexplained and mostly irrelevant, fetishes and obsessions of Kyle’s family members adorn the romantic interaction of the couple. Lainie Kazan plays Gloria, Kyle’s stepmother, an airhead blond who lives and breaths for her breasts and sexual desires. His father played Barry Bostwick is afraid of fresh air and has a crazy tan supposedly caused as side effect of an erectile dysfunction medication. Not enough? Well, his brother Marshall (Tyler Bunch) has a thing for dressing up in lady’s underwear, which makes his punctuality-obsessed wife think he is having an affair.

There is very little to rescue  Finding Joy from the black hole of forgotten, run-of-the-mill indie comedies. Some of the plot points deliver a couple laughs due to their baffling ridiculousness (the entire population of an elderly home believes if a cat name Caesar pees on them it means the will die soon), yet it is not enough to save the piece. De Rosa basically contributes to the befuddling amount of screen personages of the amazingly spirited and weird next-door girls and with the lack of genuine, creative uniqueness, in plotting and character development, the film is basically condemned to being nothing more than a generic rom com minus the A-listers.