Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

 Originally posted on AD Forums on January 19, 2012. Spoilers are marked in bold.

To say that Silver Linings Playbook shouldn't work as a film is a wild understatement. It should collapse completely, weighted down by the wildly shifting tones, the continual melange of weirdly bitter comedy and repetitive conflict. The script seems like it's trying to be Little Miss Sunshine and The Tuskeegee Experiment at the same time, which is probably one of the worst ideas ever. Jennifer Lawrence is about ten years too young to be playing her role of a world-weary, mentally shattered widow; characters randomly flit in and out of the film without any real rhyme or reason, except to prop up Pat/give Pat things to react to.

...that being said, I enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook a lot, despite all of its logical problems. This film is the exact opposite of your Les Miserables - it is extremely well-constructed, filmed beautifully, and acted to precision. It's the plot and characterization, or the gaping holes in both, that are the real problems here. While watching the film, everything is conducted with such specificity that the film seems tight as can be. A big aid to that is the two leads, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, who turn in potentially career-defining performances. Cooper, who introduced himself to the world as "Asshole Boyfriend in Wedding Crashers", is like a completely different person here, someone who embodies all of the paradoxical elements of Pat, someone who professes to be living life to its most positive while often being crushed and quelled by small quirks of reality. His portrayal of a bipolar man is not showy, doesn't rely on plate-smashing, and, because it doesn't fall to cliche, is painfully real and relatable. I particularly liked that Cooper punctuated a lot of the more intense scenes in the film with unbridled sobs, something that, to me, made him even more realistically human and broken. And enough cannot be said about how Lawrence takes Tiffany and makes her somehow toxic and winning at the same time. In the hands of a lesser actress, Tiffany would've seemed as flat, transparent, and abusive as any number of Japanese harem series "female protagonists" (the worst of which being Suzumiya Haruhi from the series of the same name) who do little to deserve their lovers' adulation and leave their respective partners coming off as complete masochists. But Lawrence is able to take scenes like Tiffany's diner breakdown and paint them truthfully - this woman is broken beyond belief, and it is not the obvious displays of violence and selfishness that attract Pat to her. It's the quieter moments she has, her willingness to take back her wild actions and defend Pat after accusing him of harassing her needlessly.

That being said, there's a lot going on in the script that makes little sense. Every time Pat gets in trouble, it seems like the same scene is being repeated ad nauseam, with no bearing on the story and no propelling the narrative. (The big climax at the dance is set up after the last of these "Pat in trouble" sequences in a gigantic dump of exposition, instead of being naturally threaded through the movie proper.) Similarly, with Tiffany, SPOILERS her sudden transformation into a sobbing sociopath for ten minutes before the dance competition, and being cured by the Demands of the Plot just in time for them to dance, was ridiculous. At least give the audience some sort of catharsis there, some sort of resolution before the two of them dance. There's an interesting idea presented midway through the film - that Jacki Weaver's mother character helped Tiffany ambush Pat on his runs - that is never elaborated on further or even mentioned. And something that would be treated as a massive betrayal of trust in any other film (not any other romantic movie, any other film in general), the reveal that Tiffany forged the letter from Nikki... is somehow a spur for Pat, who's been strongly devoted to the memory of his past marriage the entire movie, to write a letter confessing his love for Tiffany? And the crutch for them getting together in the end? That last one is a personal pet peeve of mine in romantic films in general - the need for characters to be paired up at the end to ensure some sort of 'happy ending'. I honestly feel like the Pat/Tiffany relationship would be a horrific mess of a relationship, considering she has some sort of undiagnosed disorder and he's bipolar enough to not be able to listen to certain music without breaking; this is one of those films where it would've been to the script's advantage to leave things ambiguous. END SPOILERS

The whole movie's tone, additionally, is incredibly ambiguous, in a somewhat bizarre way. The two leads suffer from various mental disorders, and those are portrayed rather realistically and with dramatic weight. Ditto to Robert DeNiro's gambling addictios, which is treated with serious, life-changing weight. But the potential mental problems of Pat's friend Danny, and his constant arrests, are played for laughs, as are DeNiro's superstitions, that whole bit with Pat knocking over the magazine rack, and pieces of Tiffany's diner scene. The film can't decide whether it wants us to sympathize with its characters, or if their actions are so ridiculous that they need to be laughed at. The constant flux between humor and drama isn't handled exceptionally well. Neither is anything requiring exposition - SPOILER there is literally no reason for Tiffany to start explaining how her husband died, when she decides to open up about it. END SPOILER The dialogue itself is very realistic, and the actors handle it well, but the script's structure is all over the place.

Weirdly, I wasn't bothered by these things when I was watching the movie. Like I said, the movie has a lot of things going for it, things that make it easy to overlook how fucking weird the entire setup is. The usage of various different methods of telling the story - steadicam, hand-held, super close-ups in dialogue, Glee spinning camera moves - give the proceedings appropriate gravity, especially during the dance rehearsal sequences, filled with joie de vivre, and during Pat's futile search for his wedding video, which utilizes the claustrophobia and franticness of the handheld camera shots well. The acting is uniformly well done, as stated earlier (and on the big Jacki Weaver debate, I thought, though she didn't do much, she gave a nice sense of understated grace to her performance as the one person in the neighborhood with her shit together); there is no fault to be found in the technical details, especially the editing and cinematography, which are varied and rich. But after reflecting on the film, the illusion of greatness really fell apart in my head. It truly is held together by the strength of Cooper and Lawrence.

***/*****