There should be warning signs at theaters screening Silver Linings Playbook: “Welcome to the
nerve center of a man’s broken brain.” It wouldn’t deter you, but it would
pique your interest and set the mood for the wonderful madness that follows.
The new David O. Russell film might be the first screwball comedy
about mental illness, surely the first without Woody Allen. It’s also, hands
down, the best film of the year.
I fell in love with Silver
Linings Playbook almost two months ago; the studio screened it ridiculously
early for the press. I knew it was the best thing I’d seen this year even then,
and I hadn’t yet seen Lincoln, Skyfall, Hitchcock and several other award-season movies. Silver Linings just washed over me,
drowning me in its quirky overlapping dialogue, note-perfect performances and
the beautiful humanity within its sad characters. Walking out of the theater, I
felt like I had a winning lottery ticket in my hand but couldn’t tell anyone.
This review is me cashing out.
Silver Linings begins
with Pat (Bradley Cooper) bouncing around a mental hospital, itching to be
free. He checks himself out, though we question that decision because it’s
clear he has more healing to do. His mother picks him up and we begin to feel the
rhythm of the plot as they trade lines in a complicated staccato of
back-and-forth dialogue. The film is driven by Pat’s own brain, his mile-a-minute
thought processes pushing the narrative forward on jolts of electricity.
Pat, trying to pick up the pieces of his life, moves in with his
parents (Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver), who seem to treat his mental illness
(“undiagnosed bipolar”) with their own mental illnesses — Pat’s father, it
seems, has a serious case of obsessive compulsive disorder, also undiagnosed.
The father spends much of the day planning the week’s hopes and wagers for Eagles
football, to which he’s dedicated much of his life. He’s one of those football
fans who watches games dutifully rubbing a superstitious binky. (Don’t know
what a “binky” is? Ask a toddler.) The film makes a strong case that maybe
we’re all a little mentally unstable, each of us in our own curious ways.
Pat carries a broken soul because he caught his wife in the
shower with another man. It sent him into turmoil and unlocked some deep-seated
emotional issues. Once out of the mental hospital, all Pat wants to do is
re-connect with his wife, which everyone agrees is a dangerous course for Pat’s
shaky mental stability. There’s a hilarious bit where Pat decides to read the
books his wife, a teacher, would teach in her classes. When he gets to the end
of Farewell to Arms, he chucks the
book out a window with an expletive and then goes into a 4 a.m. rage that ends
with him saying, “On behalf of Ernest Hemingway, I apologize.” His poor parents
are dumbstruck.
Eventually, Pat is put in touch with Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence)
because she has her own mental troubles as well: her cop husband was killed and
then she was fired from her job for sleeping with everyone. The sex story makes Pat curious, but not for the reasons you'd think. Pat’s best friend
thought the two mental cases would make a great couple. What a friend, huh?
It turns out, the two mental cases do make a great couple, though don’t think of this as a romantic
comedy because this film levitates way over that genre. Early in the film Pat
and Tiffany share some raisin bran at a diner in what might be the film’s best
scene, one that cuts back and forth to each character as they talk, but then
lets them share the same frame as they connect and compare medications. The
scene is shattered by a Stevie Wonder song, Pat’s emotional trigger because it
was playing during the reveal in the shower as well as their wedding. His raisin-bran buddy senses his breakdown and calms it in a way that made me want to weep. I found Tiffany to be a delicate young woman, tough and resilient but just a nudge away from falling down a darker hole than even Pat's abyss. She's much younger than Pat, but her troubles have aged her beyond her years. Lawrence, the Winter's Bone star who's a third of the way through the Hunger Games movies, is one of my favorite new actresses, mostly because she can express a hungry confidence in her subtle performances. Here, her Tiffany is an unmistakable treasure to Silver Linings.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of all that Silver Linings Playbook offers, because
I want you to discover much of it yourself. There are bits at an Eagles game, a
heartbreaking montage set to Zeppelin’s “What Is and What Should Never Be,” a
dance contest not much different from the big finale in Little Miss Sunshine, and lots of running in trash bags. It all
zings about in Pat’s neurotic and obsessive state of being, and I was never
sure what exactly was going to happen next. By the end, there’s a big conflict
and resolution that other films throw together without earning it. This film
earns its ending, and everything that happens is a direct result of Pat’s
strained healing. I’ve never felt so rewarded by a character’s progress.
Cooper and Lawrence, both show-stoppers and eventual Oscar
nominees, are perfect for this film. I can think of better actors, but not in
these roles, which are owned from top to bottom by Cooper and Lawrence. They
truly inhabit their characters and make them special. There are many other great
performances: De Niro and Weaver as the befuddled parents, John Ortiz as the
best friend, Shea Whigham (Sheriff Eli on Boardwalk
Empire) as Pat’s brother, and Chris Tucker playing a fellow mental patient
who repeatedly escapes his facility to lovingly check in on Pat and his
progress.
After the marvelous Three
Kings, David O. Russell had some career hiccups to get to this point. I
mean, have you seen I Heart Huckabees,
or have you seen the set videos of his flip-outs? Here, though, he has careful
control of his material and guides it through its zany points with pristine
control. I find myself deeply interested in his next project.
