Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.If 12mn people owed you their lives, you might expect some kind of monument. In lieu of a grander salute, Jean Purdy, Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards are now at least the subject of Joy, a modest but endearing Netflix movie about their work as heroes of IVF (now believed to have made possible that number of births). Together, the three pioneered the “test tube baby”, changing the world from an outbuilding at Oldham General Hospital, Greater Manchester.The film casts Thomasin McKenzie as lab technician Purdy, with two co-stars playing lightly against type: James Norton is bluff physiologist Edwards, and Bill Nighy a borderline spiky version of obstetrician Steptoe. We open in 1968, with revolution afoot in provincial England. A simple wish — to help the unhappily childless — calls for scientific miracles. “Fertilising an egg outside the body,” Nighy asks Norton. “You truly believe you can do that?”You feel the film taking a deep breath at the task it has set itself: broad-strokes storytelling that also treats the audience as smart and interested enough for clinical detail. Talk of laparoscopies comes between bits about holes in tights and chutney. Understandably, the movie often takes refuge in the crowd-pleasing sight of the stars in period hair and costume, as work continues through the 1970s with meagre support from the medical establishment.Director Ben Taylor comes to Joy from TV, and a gulf can open up between the film’s cosy vibe and the characters’ radical ambition. But the small scale makes sense too: underscoring the sweetly human nature of the project, with the team accused by press and religious activists of playing unholy Dr Frankensteins.Another quietly bold move nudges Purdy to the centre of the story. (What recognition there has been of the three trailblazers until now has often forgotten her.) Still, it is Nighy who is in the frame the one time the film takes real rhapsodic flight: an operating room scene set to Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which the music-loving Steptoe plays on a nearby turntable. The magic onscreen seems fitting: a small moment of wonder, arrived against the odds.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from November 15 and on Netflix from November 22
