One of the defining qualities of Tyler Perry’s movies — it’s what keeps you watching but also what can make them, on occasion, seem borderline loopy — is the wild mix of tones, sort of like mood swings. Perry’s films can lurch from romance to madcap Madea comedy to skeletons-in-the-closet family drama and back…all in the space of 20 minutes. Recent years have seen him growing as a filmmaker (the complex historical fable “A Jazzman’s Blues,” the wartime drama “The Six Triple Eight”), but “Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy” is a throwback, and not in a good way. It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.
“Finding Joy” is basically a two-hander that sets itself up when Joy (Shannon Thornton), an aspiring New York fashion designer, winds up driving through a Colorado blizzard, at which point she and her stalled car plunge through the ice. The next things she knows, she wakes up, warm and dry, in a remote cabin that’s the home of Ridge (Tosin Morohunfola), one of Perry’s Rugged Noble Deep-Voiced Dreamboats Who Could Be Your Salvation.
He was out hunting and rescued her (how that happened isn’t clear — the last we saw she was 20 feet under the icy water). Okay, he’s a little unfriendly at first. But he’s ripped, he’s handsome, he’s a stoic gentleman who, in his beard and flannel shirt, looks like (in Joy’s words) a “Black lumberjack.” And the movie, with these two sexy people sparring for about 10 minutes, only to settle their differences over whiskey before a roaring fire in a snowbound cabin that looks like a vacation hideaway, has an unironic romance-novel baby-it’s-cold-outside vibe of old-school desert-island love. They’ll wait out the storm, which might take a week, and he’ll drive her in his truck the 12 miles down the mountain. But it’s beyond obvious where this is all going, and that’s kind of a dramatic problem. We’re simply waiting for the ice — outside and between them — to thaw.
How did Joy nearly die in the wilderness of Colorado, a place that, in a joke the film keeps repeating, is almost all white people? The early scenes introduce her as a gifted designer who, despite her beauty and charisma, allows herself to be a doormat in both career and love. Pat-Treek (Eric Stanton Betts), the head of the label she works for, is a disdainful cad who rips off her colorful designs from years before. And she keeps dating men who don’t love her. That’s why she follows Colton (Aaron O’Connell) to his family’s house in Colorado, thinking that this amiable Ken doll likes her, only to learn that he’s engaged and that he wants her to be the equivalent of his best man.
But once Joy gets rescued and settles into Ridge’s small warm rosy candle-lit cabin, the film’s only dramatic question is: Why is he living like the Unabomber, cooking his rabbit stew in the middle of nowhere, without even a cell phone or radio? (There are tender reasons why, most of them hinging on how devoted he was to his late mother.) The two are united by Perry- esque symmetries. Both are still recovering from relationships that ended in their partners’ infidelity. And his mother’s name was…Joy.
“Finding Joy” is no comedy, but Joy’s friends back in New York, the stoner Littia (Inayah) and the harder-bitten Ashley (Brittany S. Hall), lighten the proceedings a bit, and there’s one rom-com moment. Joy goes to the frozen outhouse, sits on the wet toilet seat, and sticks to it like the kid’s tongue sticking to a pole in “A Christmas Story.” So Ridge has got to come in there, while her pants are down, and pull her off the seat before she freezes to death. Yet the only real chuckles I got from “Finding Joy” were the unintentional kind — like in response to the grand reversal of fortune that happens to Joy once she returns to work. It’s the stuff of fairy tales, but a romantic fairy tale can carry you away, or it can merely play, as it does here, like the adult version of kids’ stuff.
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