“Joy” has been a much-used title in recent years, one that a new film about the battle to develop in-vitro fertilization treatment justifies recycling once more with a late-film reveal: It was the middle name given to Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first so-called “test-tube baby,” and the first successful outcome in over a decade of agonized, controversial medical research. But joy is also the primary MO of this debut feature from British TV comedy director Ben Taylor (“Sex Education,” “Catastrophe”), which assigns itself the somewhat tricky task of fashioning an uplifting audience-pleaser from story material in which moments of elation are considerably outnumbered by those of crushing heartbreak.
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To this day, after all, the odds are stacked against women applying for IVF, given its daunting success rate (still well below 50%) and sometimes prohibitive costs: While at least 12 million children have been born via the procedure in the last 45 years, many more remain the unrealized dream of their parents.
Jack Thorne’s script for “Joy” navigates this tonal challenge by focusing its narrative on a woman not undergoing the treatment, but heavily invested in it just the same: Jean Purdy, the young British nurse who joined an otherwise male-dominated fertility research team as an assistant in 1969, before becoming more integrally involved as an embryologist in the years leading up to Brown’s game-changing 1978 birth. Played with plucky, earnest resolve by Thomasin McKenzie, she serves in the film as both unsung heroine and audience surrogate, cutting through the patriarchal blather of the 1970s scientific fraternity with disarming common sense and emotional intelligence.
That the working-class, God-fearing Purdy had frustrated maternal aspirations of her own is a character detail that “Joy” withholds for longer than one might expect, and indeed the film never quite gets under the skin of a woman whose contribution to this trailblazing project wasn’t formally acknowledged until long after her cancer-related death at just 39 years of age. She’s introduced, bright-eyed and squeaky-clean, applying for an assistant position at the Cambridge laboratory of charmingly distracted physiologist Dr. Bob Edwards (James Norton), whose nascent IVF trials are still at the hamster-testing stage.
They need an obstetrician on board: Enter crotchety but kind-hearted Patrick Steptoe (a typically, elegantly droll Bill Nighy), resident at a shabby, underfunded hospital further north in Oldham, who isn’t afraid to stand up to skeptical gatekeepers in the medical world. Such brazenness is essential at a time when the very idea of conceiving a child outside the womb is regarded as a kind of crime against nature by much of the British public, egged on by the twin forces of church and tabloid media — the latter quick to dub Edwards “Dr. Frankenstein” once news breaks of his research.
On discovering what her daughter is really working on, Purdy’s conservative mother Gladys (Joanna Scanlan) is sufficiently scandalized to bar her from the family home. A sketchily drawn romance with sweet, dorky junior doctor Arun (Rish Shah) teases the possibility of domestic bliss, but Purdy resists, sensing no nuclear family in her future, even as her team inches toward a miraculous medical breakthrough.
“Joy” errs on the side of coziness in its opening stretches, locating a seam of gentle comedy in the personality conflicts between ingenuous Purdy, well-meaningly gauche Edwards and world-weary Steptoe as they find their working dynamic, and filling the soundtrack with upbeat pop-soul cuts from the era. Jamie Cairney’s lensing is soft and sun-warmed, give or take the drear of Greater Manchester, while even Sinéad Kidao tweedy period costuming is comfortingly snuggly.
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That jauntiness dissipates as the project runs into various disheartening roadblocks of denied funding and failed trials, though “Joy” still cushions the human devastation at play here. It’s only glancingly attentive to the inner lives of the childless women — collectively calling themselves “The Ovum Club” — undergoing this experimental treatment, having been warned that they’re likelier to pave the way for others than to become mothers themselves. Early in the process, Purdy is criticized by one of these hopefuls for treating them “like cattle,” and adjusts her bedside manner accordingly. Edwards, too, is admonished by a colleague for speaking of women as if they’re test animals, before later proving his deeper attachment with a complete recital of their names.
Yet similar charges can be leveled at “Joy,” which is overly cursory in its treatment of these vulnerable lives — one mentions being a victim of domestic abuse and is never revisited, another is permitted a brief, stoic reaction shot to news of an ectopic pregnancy — but aims for collective catharsis as Purdy gathers them for one spirit-lifting montage of beachside revelry. Even Lesley Brown (Ella Bruccoleri), history’s first mother by IVF, is oddly shortchanged by the film, given not so much as a waking moment on screen after a climactic and duly eye-moistening birth sequence: One can’t help but wonder if a female director and screenwriter might have made some rather different choices.
Still, it’s hard to be unmoved by “Joy,” which taps into a fairly universal well of feeling regarding the choices we make, or are denied, in the families we build for ourselves. It’s sure to crumple a lot of hearts when it bows on Netflix, following its gala premiere at the London Film Festival, as viewers project their own lives onto its narrative. Despite McKenzie’s appealing, honestly felt efforts, Purdy herself feels as much a proxy for the anguish and yearning of her patients as a character in her own right. When she admits to Gladys that she’s been having unprotected sex for ten years, hoping to fall pregnant, we’re as surprised as her mother is.
A bookending voiceover by Norton’s Edwards lobbies for the addition of Purdy’s name to the memorial plaque marking the first IVF birth at Oldham Hospital, stressing the valid point that medical history isn’t made by doctors alone. “Joy” echoes the good work of the plaque in elevating a woman’s name to the status of her male colleagues and contemporaries. The lost life behind that name remains a little harder to read.
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