If I told you the new movie Silver Linings Playbook was a romantic comedy about two people dealing with mental illness, you might at best expect a cheesy Hallmark movie or at worst an offensive treatment of serious psychological issues. Instead, writer-director David O. Russell gives us a disarming and uproarious film, at once a domestic comedy and a tentative romance.
We meet Pat (Bradley Cooper) just as he is released to live with his parents eight months after being admitted to a mental institution. Eventually the movie reveals that it was due to catching his wife in the shower with a colleague, then beating said colleague to near death. That threat of violence simmers under his surface for much of the film, erupting at various points. But those eruptions evolve over the course of the film: first coming as frustration and anger stemming from his wife's infidelity, then turning into something protective, defending those who have supported him.
When one of those people, Ronnie (John Ortiz), invites him over for dinner with his family, Pat meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), who herself is going through a mental breakdown after the death of her husband. Tiffany's illness has all but removed her filter and she is willing to say nearly anything, no matter how awkward or uncomfortable. And her interactions with Pat, whose sense of social proprietary is similarly misplaced, are often guffaw-level hilarious.
His parents of course are his other support system. Dolores (Jacki Weaver) is the doting mother, who seems mostly concerned with serving "crabby snacks and homemades" during Philadelphia Eagles games. Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) is his father, who seems mostly concerned with, well, Philadelphia Eagles games and it's actually through football he intends to bond with his son (while also thinking Pat brings some good "juju" to the team).The absurdity of Pat's domestic existence at first feels overkill until you begin to realize--in my case quite deep into its running time--one of the core tenets of the movie (one of its "messages," if one can attribute something like that to a film): that everyone is crazy. It's crazy to think wearing a certain jersey or having the remote in a certain position would affect the outcome of a football game. It's crazy that a married couple always has to choose sides in a divorce of another couple. It's crazy to pine over the ex-wife who cheated on you.
All of this may have turned into (and may sound by my generic description) as something trite and maudlin, but the film almost deceptively ratchets up into something more broad, more kinetic. Part of the charm of the film is that it doesn't really try to explain mental illness, at least in any clinical way. Nor does it possess the all-too-well-intentioned, but schmaltzy parable of acceptance. I've complained about judging a movie based on its trailer (and lamented the fact that I've done it myself) and this is clear example of that. The original trailer made it feel like this was exactly the type of middlebrow, crowd-pleasing, Oscar-bait movie we see with regularity this time of the year. The type of movie where, despite suffering from mental illness, if each of the characters just found someone to love, everything would be alright. But O. Russell's comedies (and to some degree every movie he has directed can be regarded as a comedy) never tackle their subjects in a straightforward fashion. The case here is no different and Silver Linings Playbook instead possesses the anarchic spirit of the screwball comedy, that most absurdist of Hollywood genres emerging out of the great depression. And it perhaps is no coincidence that the supposed nonsense of the film's final act has its stakes raised to dramatically affect the economic hardships of one of its characters.
This is a career achievement for Cooper, who's previously been serviceable in much lesser movies like The Hangover or Valentine's Day. But there was little indication of the depths of both the humor and pathos he brings to Pat. For Lawrence, this is merely further validation of her place among the elite class of the new generation of American actresses. She brings the same stoic determination to something as different as Winter's Bone as she does to something as broad and manic as her performance here. Both performances seemed destined, and deservedly so, for various year-end award nominations. It's between them where the movie shines as well as in the way O. Russell (in adapting Matthew Quick's novel) refuses to sentimentalize what could have been saccharine material. It's sneakily one of the best movies of the year.
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