A medical first: Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie and James Norton in Joy. (Photo / Supplied)
A medical first: Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie and James Norton in Joy. (Photo / Supplied)
Having started out playing the young Louise Nicholas in the local 2014 television film Consent, a decade later the now 24-year-old Thomasin McKenzie gets her first adult biopic role in Joy, a very English, very enjoyable, if only moderately educational medical science history drama.
She plays embryologist nurse Jean Purdy,whose overlooked role in the development of in vitro fertilisation came with a personal price higher than the male scientists she worked alongside. It’s through Purdy’s eyes that the film tells its nine-year story leading to the first IVF birth of Louise Joy Brown in 1978.
McKenzie is terrific as the nurse, who acted as a lateral thinker in the IVF procedure’s development. She was also a go-between between the inevitably disappointed test patients, who dubbed themselves “the Ovum Club”, driven Cambridge biologist Robert Edwards (James Norton) and stern but sympathetic obstetrician and laparoscopy pioneer Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy).
You might think IVF was the product of a shiny well-funded state-of-the-art facility, but it was largely developed in the dowdy Oldham hospital where Steptoe worked, and who with Edwards had an ongoing battle with the medical establishment. Worse was to come from an alarmist media, which seized upon “test tube babies” as a headline.
Purdy was a Christian whose mother and congregation disowned her, and whose severe endometriosis meant she could never have children, so her participation was brave and remarkable. Joy can feel that it’s on an inevitable plodding loop of disappointment and hope, all the way to Louise’s arrival. But when she does, well, tissues.
Rating out of five: ★★★½
Joy, directed by Ben Taylor is streaming now on Netflix.
