Joy must be the most Felicity Jones-ian film she’s ever not been in. The true-life tale of the world’s first IVF baby – a radical evolution for medical science – has become a prim, diligent Britflick which majors in knitwear, needle-drops, and cycling around Cambridge. It renders a fascinating story into something exasperatingly formulaic, as if they asked a Netflix algorithm to write and direct it.
The former task was given to a clearly overloaded Jack Thorne, the latter to Sex Education’s Ben Taylor. Neither is bringing their A-game, but delivering the cinematic equivalent of a rushed tutorial essay scribbled on the back of some beer mats. To pick one line, “You’re going to want to see this!”, to cue up peering down microscopes, is such a tired clunker you really can’t get away with it repeatedly in the same film.
The folks peering are a trio of like-minded mavericks in the late 1960s: the embryologist Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy, dapper in hats as ever) and reproductivity pioneer Bob Edwards (a speccy James Norton). Fighting vitriolic opposition, they pursued their studies together over a decade, with a goal to, as Bob puts it, “end childlessness” by experimenting with fertilisation outside the womb.
The subject, so controversial in its day, deserved some measure of intellectual cut-and-thrust, which only one scene hints at, when Bob contests the idea of infertility being Nature’s check on overpopulation. Alas, when he defends his research on live TV against James Watson (Nicholas Rowe), the baying crowd are such a mass of ignoramuses that all nuance gets drowned out.
Nighy and Norton are on blandly affable autopilot. The more demanding assignment is McKenzie’s, because her character not only alienates her ultra-religious mother (Joanna Scanlan, squandered) but suffers quietly herself from endometriosis. Alas, the Kiwi star is adrift here, caught between the kittenish stylings of Last Night in Soho and the dogged impression of a junior Ms Jones they seem intent on making her do.