“Silver Linings Playbook” Is The Movie Of The Year
“I like to think I’m normal and everyone else is crazy.” This is the mantra the girl I took to my junior prom often recited. I probably thought of myself the same way. She wasn’t really crazy, of course, but that’s not really the point – the point is that people, whether by lineage or choice, are so often surrounded by others cut of the same cloth. You are normal. Your family is normal. Everyone else is crazy, even while everyone else assumes they and their family are normal and you and your family and everyone else are crazy.
Silver Linings Playbook, directed and adapted by David O. Russell from a Matthew Quick novel, opens in the guise of a commonsense chronicling of clinical craziness. Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper, fusing with his character so effortlessly you might not notice how stellar he is) has just been released from the mental institution after an eight month stint in the wake of a violent episode involving his wife. Pat’s patient mother (Jacki Weaver) picks him up. His father Pat Sr. (Robert DeNiro), seems less assured his son is ready to re-face the emotional rigors of everyday life.
At first, Pat Jr. appears a loner, an outsider estranged from his family, but as we become closer to the Family Solitano we realize that Pat Jr.’s bi-polar disorder is a product of Pat Sr.’s inflamed O.C.D. involving his beloved Philadelphia Eagles, whether gambling or otherwise, shining a knowing, comical spotlight on the way America has become a football-crazed rubber room.
Russell’s camera spends much of the film swaying back and forth and zooming in and out and wandering to and fro, a masterstroke suggesting, without becoming a distraction, the inner-workings of Pat’s racing mind. He talks full-tilt and without a filter, again and again promising not to ask followup questions and then asking them anyway, unnecessarily charging conversations and situations with pointed queries because he genuinely does not know any better. He admits he does not know any better. Thus, he pledges to do better, to “remake himself”, jogging like an idiosyncratic Rocky and reading Hemingway.
He eventually Meets Cute (Crazy?) with the sorrowfully rageful sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) of his married, child-rearing friends Ronnie (John Ortiz) and Veronica (Julia Stiles). She has a stained past of her own involving an ex-husband. Pat looks at Tiffany like she’s the craziest person he’s ever met. Tiffany cannot believe that someone as crazy as Pat could deign to call her crazier than him. Lawrence, fast becoming one of our best working actresses of any age, crafts a fully formed individual, bawdy but poignant (not tragic), alternately pushing Pat to do better and picking at him when he doesn’t. Likewise, she conveys the way in which he honors who she is by not simply saying what she wants to hear.
He resists her erratic charms because, as he repeatedly states, he yearns only to make amends and re-unite with his wife whom he still loves and whom he is convinced will eventually re-reciprocate that love. Never mind that she took out a restraining order against him. Tiffany offers to illegally deliver a letter from Pat to his ex-wife if Pat agrees to become her partner for a Christmas dance contest.
At this point viewers will be forgiven for suspecting a movie about mental checks and balances is on the verge of plunging into sentimentality. And this is partly because David O. Russell’s intention is to subvert the sentimentality by serving it in a glorious loony bin of a third act that does what so few film do anymore these days and brings together its entire frenzied horde on a single stage. The setting is no accident. Christmas is a time, the refrain goes, when families come together to set aside their differences. But what they’re really doing is embracing similarities and standing united. In the end, Pat Jr. does not remake himself. He realizes he’s already made and makes his own variation of peace with it.
Silver Linings Playbook has the structure and ethos of a Romantic Comedy, a genre which typically manipulates viewers into ostensibly falling for an emotionally counterfeit ending. David O. Russell, however, subtly, skillfully and wonderfully has crafted a screwball comedy about screwed up but – deep down – loving people continually lying to and manipulating each other. And the conclusion, which has the outward appearance of formula, is not false because it’s the one time this whole dysfunctional clan stops lying and manipulating and finally gives in to what’s true.
17 Comments
Right now, this film is in my top 5 films of 2012. It surprised the hell out of me. Plus, it’s got a killer soundtrack.
That Alabama Shakes song, that’s the new “I’m Gonna Fly.”
I still can’t decide which movies to include in my top 10 but I might include this one, too. I don’t see it as a rom-com but if it were, it’s certainly one of the best. I’ve always liked Jennifer Lawrence but I like here even more after this.
Isn’t Jennifer Lawrence amazing? This AND “The Hunger Games”? In the same year? At age 22?
Just saw this movie this morning. It definitely is structured like a romantic comedy but this movie is so much more! Awesome performances from the cast, witty dialogue, and a sweet sometimes painful poignancy to the proceedings really set this movie apart from other rom coms.
I was quite impressed by Cooper’s work here and Lawrence bounced back nicely from her somewhat wooden performance in the hunger games. I loved that Russell spent a fair amount of time developing the characters rather than cutting to the chase with Tiffany and the dance.
The third act gets tidied up a bit too neatly but overall, one of my favorite movies of the year so far.
“I loved that Russell spent a fair amount of time developing the characters rather than cutting to the chase with Tiffany and the dance.” Extremely well said. How long does it take them to even MENTION the dance for the first time? A good deal of screen time. For as frenetic as the film feels, it really is patient storytelling-wise.
Nice to see a good review of this one. Looks like another film that hopefully will add to my top ten of the year list!!
My Top 10 will be quite a jumble, aside from this one shining beacon calling out from on top.
Perfect review. I fell in love with this movie as well and I am dying to go watch it again. Top 10…scratch that, top 5, easy.
I loved that you mentioned Russell’s camerawork, too. I’m not really familiar with his filmography but I was really impressed and surprised with SLP.
Again, great review!
Thank you! I appreciate that. I was honestly not that big of a Russell fan going in. I didn’t dislike him or anything – though I was much less than enamored with “I Heart Huckabees” – but this one just SPOKE to me.
Will some please tell me why I just do not like Jennifer Lawrence?
Her chubby face!
Hey! You leave J.Law alone!
(J.Law? Forget I said that.)
I’ll agree with you on one point: this is going to be the movie of the year, in the sense that it’s going to be that off-kilter “indie” darling that reaches across the aisle and develops an audience that includes the casual art house crowd and mainstream theater-goers alike. It’s this year’s The Artist, though I like it far more than I liked that film.
But I don’t agree at all with the notion that the ending doesn’t plunge into sentimentality. The third act is all about sentimentality and landing beat after expected beat in what winds up being a really by-the-numbers rom-com climax. Everything leading up to the climax is gravy, I think; Lawrence and Cooper are great, and in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever liked Cooper this much in a movie, and Russell shows that a film can operate within genre confines and still be very good. He even stretches boundaries a bit by making a movie that’s inherently unsafe (because there’s nothing safe about two mentally unstable people with tons of emotional baggage linking romantically).
It’s just that he kind of undermines all of that by doing the most predictable things possible in the final act. There’s a giant, impossible bet that the protagonists have to win, there’s a dance competition, there are secret love letters, there’s a really bad attempt at deceiving the audience into thinking Pat’s still obsessed with getting back together with Nikki, and there’s a big sloppy kiss shot in the Christmas light illuminated streets as the camera spins around and around and around. It doesn’t get any more stereotypical than that.
It works well enough, mind, but that’s because we like Tiffany and Pat at that point. It’s just not the climax that the movie deserves.
It does land all those expected beats. That’s absolutely true. But what I liked so much about it was how it set those beats up on account of all the character’s manipulations. Pat Sr. NEEDS to win this bet and in order to win the bet he NEEDS his son to compete in the dance contest and the only way he can GET his son to compete in the dance contest – at the suggestion of Tiffany – is to lie and tell him that his wife is going to be there. Granted, Pat realizes that they are lying to him but then that’s what I thought made it allowable for him to wait to express what he really felt to Tiffany until the very end. Realizing that she’s lying to HIM, he decides to lie to HER……until he decides to tell her the truth. I mean, that’s perfect! Lying and scheming their way to true love! It’s narcissism giving way to Nora Ephron.
It is sentimental, yes, but I think how it goes about setting up that third act and then achieving the climax eclipses those traditional rom com roots.
Love Russell, really looking forward to seeing this!
What really surprised me is the fact that Bradley Cooper won Best Actor NBR, over Daniel Day Lewis. Oh I’m so looking forward to watching it! Nice review!
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