Joy Is an Incomplete Account of the Laborious Birth of IVF

One wonders if when British biographical drama Joy was first, erm, conceived, there was much consideration or realization by screenwriter Jack Thorne–author of the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, of all things–of how prominently the topic of IVF (In vitro fertilization) would be back in the news cycle by the time the film was released, decades after the procedure had become a relatively commonplace tool in the battle against declining human fertility. Perhaps it’s simply coincidence that this rather conventional biopic on the three scientists who ushered in the birth of IVF, Robert Edward, Jean Purdy and Patrick Steptoe, arrives in a moment when the procedure is seeing a renewal of the same luddite opposition and legal challenges that threatened its development in the 1960s and 1970s. But regardless, it gives director Ben Taylor’s film both its inherently political hook, at a time when the world is reeling in the wake of a surge of right-wing religious nationalism, and simultaneously threatens to turn it into a ham-fisted message movie on the dangers of close-mindedness and lack of empathy. Joy has some empathy of its own to supply, for each of its three lead scientists in particular, though it also misses an opportunity to more richly explore the grounding humanity of those hundreds of would-be parents who willingly signed up to participate in emotionally wracking experiments with little chance of success some 50 years ago. At the very least, it manages to remind us of how miraculous the commitment of human ingenuity can be, when it comes to making a new life possible.

Joy begins in the late 1960s, as enterprising young embryologist Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie) meets grinning medical optimist Robert (“Bob”) Edwards (James Norton), who dreams of nothing short of solving infertility for any woman who wants a child. Bob effectively considers this to be a human right, though we’re never really given enough insight into his character to understand why the topic is so personally important to him. More characterization is instead afforded to Jean, a young woman of an increasingly progressive era who is caught between the straight-laced religious repression of her upbringing, and her understandable desire to help other women who, like her, face seemingly insurmountable barriers between themselves and pregnancy. It’s both sad and ironic that the real-life Purdy dedicated her life to fertility when her own struggle with endometriosis was beyond the power of contemporary science to alleviate, and this can’t help but beatify the character to some extent. That harsh news about her own chance to conceive is delivered by third group member Dr. Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist and surgeon played with weary warmth by a wonderful Bill Nighy, supplying the connection with hopeful mothers that will be necessary to conduct this decade-spanning research.

The film plays as a sort of scientific buddy drama, the three complementary but sometimes clashing personalities challenging and supporting each other over the course of years as their research progresses. Bob is brash, confident and optimistic to a degree that is almost grating, paired with a short fuse that threatens to harm the project when he’s forced to face down those angry, short-sighted traditionalists who accuse their scientific research of being an affront to God, or even compare it to the murderous science of Nazi doctors such as Josef Mengele. Jean is his canny and perceptive double, a good facilitator able to consistently revive the spark of hope each time the process leads down yet another dead end. Patrick is less concerned with the medical theory of fertilization; more with the physical challenges of actually carrying out a pregnancy from an embryo fertilized in a lab. In early scenes, they come off as rather cheerfully certain of their eventual success, but professional and especially personal opposition steadily erodes that certainty, leaving Jean in particular struggling to reconcile whether the research is worth the considerable sacrifice she’s made to face.

This struggle for Jean takes a turn for the melodramatic within the first 20 minutes, as she’s given a rather abrupt ultimatum by her god-fearing mother (Joanna Scanlan) and subsequently cast out from both her own mother’s home and church community, for the unthinkable sin of helping other women to conceive a baby. In response, Jean attempts the kind of futile, logic-grounded reasoning that we as a society have now increasingly come to acknowledge simply does not work when dealing with fanaticism and culture wars. “What about spectacles, or false teeth?” she asks her mother–reasoning that surely if your answer to infertility is that God doesn’t intend for that woman to become pregnant, then you should also agree that God intends anyone with eye or tooth problems to be blind or unable to feed themselves. If it’s a sin to address health issues, shouldn’t we all just accept whatever happens to us? Mom unsurprisingly has no answer for this, and responds by simply ignoring the question, unwilling to grapple with the obvious hypocrisy of it all. The character is presented as an infuriatingly rigid wall, one whose emotional neglect eventually plays a role in Jean abandoning the research for a time in order to care for her when she becomes ill. This is the height of Joy’s sappier, emotionally manipulative side, allowing Mom just enough time for an “I’ve always loved you” before her death, which we’re presumably meant to see as some form of absolution. It’s not quite clear whether Jean truly registers what a number the woman has done on her.

As a character, McKenzie demonstrates some welcome nuance within Jean, who in more ways than one is still her mother’s daughter even if she doesn’t see it. After befriending attractive coworker Arun (Rish Shah), she tells him that “if you promise not to become attached, we can have sex”–rather shockingly forward for a young woman who also seems sincere in her faith, who feels that her work and her religious faith shouldn’t need to be incompatible. At the same time, though, Jean is inconsistent and occasionally hypocritical herself, initially having a strong moral and emotional objection to the hospital where her team works performing abortions–this despite the fact that she engages in the sort of casual sex that would be equally condemned by her faith and likely to result in accidental pregnancies for another woman. It’s the screenplay’s way of illustrating how we’re all a product of our influences at the end of the day, whether we recognize it or acknowledge it. Jean reasons that her sexuality is free from consequence because she’s physically unable to conceive, something that she also ultimately allows to stand in the way of pursuing meaningful relationships because she sees herself as being unable to supply the expected “end game” of marriage, children. All of this she keeps largely to herself, which engenders sympathy for the likes of Arun even when he’s being unwittingly misogynistic, as when he tells Jean that he’ll simply wait for her to be ready for marriage, because “you’ll change your mind.”

Where Joy stumbles a bit, though, is in its myriad missed opportunities to more genuinely incorporate the individual lives and stories of the other integral partners who made the birth of IVF a possibility, the hundreds of women (and by extension their partners) who struggled through months or years of failed treatments and broken dreams in the name of developing the science that would eventually help other, luckier women to achieve the goal. We meet some of them, but it’s in a transient way, mirroring the manner in which they cycle in and out of the program over the years, some after exhausting all of the slim opportunities to conceive that they’ll ever have. One of them shares criticism with Jean at one point that the women sometimes feel like “cattle,” held at a professional length of disinterest by the researchers, which makes McKenzie’s character more committed to connecting with those women (the “Ovum Club”) on a personal level. But the film doesn’t really mirror the character’s interest, merely scraping the surface level aspirations of these dozens of women who sacrificed so much for the development of a technology that has come to have profound effects on society.

This unfortunate note of disinterest most clearly extends to Lesley and John Brown, the parents who would go on to have the first successful IVF baby in 1978 after nine years of trying to conceive. They’re introduced extremely late in the game thanks to Joy’s purely linear structure, which doesn’t allow the audience any opportunity to recognize their significance or get a genuine feel for the journey these particular people have been on for almost a decade. Perhaps if we had intercut the lives of the Browns throughout the film, it would have helped to build an ascending narrative that would reflect the emotional journey toward such a momentous achievement. The film’s title, by the way, is ultimately an extension of their daughter: Louise Joy Brown was born in 1978 as the first IVF baby. She’s now 46 years old, but unlike the scientists, she doesn’t receive any further update in the film’s “where are they now?” closing credits montage. It feels odd that the film’s interest in her seems to end at the moment of birth.

Regardless, for the majority of its runtime, Joy is a gently moving, well-acted (especially Bill Nighy) portrait of the pitfalls and ultimate rewards of a labor of love, even if it is beset by needle drops that are consistently on the precious and saccharine side, beginning instantly with Nina Simone’s cover of “Here Comes the Sun” over opening credits. At the very least, it gives Thomasin McKenzie the excuse to fall back on some of her Last Night in Soho go-go dancing–it must have been nice to know that she didn’t learn all those skills for nothing. The real Jean Purdy sadly passed away from cancer at the age of 39 in 1985, but she still lived long enough to see several hundred children born around the world via IVF. Today that number is in the many millions.

In a time when U.S. states have actually banned the IVF procedure on thinly veiled religious pretexts, and the GOP Congress has failed to ensure access to it as a medical right, one can only hope that Joy will serve as a reminder to at least some viewers of the labor that went into such a miraculous process half a century ago. Making a life has only gotten that much harder: As a species, we need all the help we can get.

Director: Ben Taylor
Writer: Jack Thorne
Stars: Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton, Bill Nighy, Rish Shah, Joanna Scanlan, Tanya Moodie
Release date: Nov. 22, 2024 (Netflix)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.