Review: Silver Linings Playbook

Each year I read move reviews, listen to things on NPR, occasionally grab onto something from the Atlantic or Harper's, and become insanely attached to the idea that I need to see a particular movie. This year that movie was Silver Linings Playbook. I had irrational confidence that it was going to be good. It's like crossing half court and launching a three just because you hit your first shot kind of confidence. It doesn't make sense why you believe that you'll make that shot or that this movie is going to be awesome, but you're also pretty sure that the shot is going in and that the movie is going to be awesome.

I had irrational confidence last year about the movie "Like Crazy" after hearing a stellar review on NPR. The movie was meh, perhaps a bit too concerned with constructing things artfully than with establishing characters who I cared about. However, a couple of years ago my irrational confidence movie was "Black Swan," and Black Swan was amazing. It probably should have won the Oscar. I'm biased towards artsy type fair, but that shi- was good.

Let me start out by saying that I really enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook. It's perhaps the best movie I've seen amongst this year's crop, though I've a lot of wholes and some strangely conflicted feelings about whether Lincolin was a good movie with great acting and a great story line or whether that just means it was  great movie. SLP turns out to be a strange ride. Even though it follows certain romantic genre conceptions, on the whole, I spent the whole movie not knowing what was going to come next. Would we have a fight? A dance scene? A conversation about the spread of a football game? A tender family moment?

The movie begins with some cringe worthy moments. Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, celebrates his return to society from a mental institution by grabbing the wheel from his mom's hands while they are driving on the highway. Anyone who has driven a car probably also had that feeling of, it's okay to do crazy shi-, but not shi- that crazy. He follows this up with a 4 A.M. diatribe about the plot problems at the end of A Farwell to Arms, which he tosses throws through a window after finishing. While the bit is funny, we're also currently living in a country where "mental health" is a buzzword that is currently in use. In fact, an adjustment to our mental health standards seems to be about the only thing that people can agree on in the gun debate. (This is largely because some folks out there believe that the Constitution and Second Amendment Rights therein are somehow inviolable, despite what people like Jeffery Toobin have pointed out ie, that it may only be granting the right to bear arms to the militia. At times, in our current climate I wonder if people think the Constitution stands above the Bible in holiness and wonder if somehow the idea was spread that it was dictated through all three persons of the Trinity).

It is just this environment that makes the early portions of SLP so hard to watch. I find it hard to watch scenes of mental illness depicted without wondering, or remembering the number of people that I've known who have been afflicted. I think the movie does a wonderful job of showing how destructive it can be without demonizing or glorifying it. Neither Sal, nor his quasi savior, Tiffany, who also suffers from mental illness, are the sorts of folks who seem capable of enjoying a nice date at the zoo. Rather, we see that each day can present its own challenges, and especially in the case of, Sal, we see how his illness has deeply effected the relationship of his entire family.

Sal's parents, played by Robert DeNiro and Jackie Weaver are just plain excellent. The audience sees the struggle of love, disappointment, guilt, and belief in their son. A belief and attention that serve both as cornerstone and mill stone of their familial relationship. It eventually becomes clear that Sal's father also suffers from mental health issues, which have manifested themselves in his unhealthy gambling and love affair with watching the Philadelphia Eagles play on Sunday.

The movie is also consistently funny. Whether it's Sal walking around upstairs explaining just why "A Farewell to Arms" is so terrible, (something along the lines of, "the world is such a difficult place to live in as it is, why have children in high school reading books that are going to make them depressed. It's a bit more colorful and funny than my rendition) or Jennifer Lawrence playing, Tiffany, appearing from behind a tree slap stick style and chasing Sal down the street peppering him with questions, or Sal's best friend using his hand to cover his entire face in order to describe the feeling of his job, work and baby all at once; the movie is not a comedy, but it makes you laugh.

The relationship between Sal and Tiffany, which is the centerpiece of the movie, is bizarre, strange, sweet, and manipulative. I find myself pleased with the way this movie managed to play so many notes, mixing comedy, drama, sadness, mental health issues into a strangely coherent whole. I suppose, despite the general Hollywoodishness of some portions of the movie, that's why it felt like a better stab at life than some movies. The difference between the characters in SLP and the characters that most of us are playing in our everyday lives is that their shi- was externalized due to their illness. They were unsuccessful at hiding the deeper emotions and problems that plague most human beings unbeknownst to everyone else around. Sit on a subway and look around. All of these unique individuals on the train car with you have painful and beautiful stories. Now look down. It is impolite to make eye contact and the weight of the world would crush you. And so it winds up being hard not to root for people who you know probably shouldn't be in relationship with one another because they are so obviously troubled.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about a couple of other minor items. The camera was certainly not apologetic in its admiration of the figure of Mrs. Jennifer Lawrence, an actress who is, perhaps deservingly, going around collecting best actress awards. However, I remember Michael Bay being castigated for just such transgressions in Transformers 3, which, to be fair, is apparently a horrendous movie all around, so I didn't want to let it slip by without note. There is of course a much longer discourse that could take place about whether that was important for the character or not, or the film on the whole, or art, or feminism, or the male gaze etc. You could also make some sort of counterargument that it's not her fault that she looks fantastic in dance scenes, and that's why I have almost nothing useful to say on this subject, other than to say that it was present. However, if you held my feet to the fire I'd probably say no and cut a couple of the more gratuitously admiring a fit 21 year old shots that litter the latter portion of the movie.

However, I also find it curious that Miss Lawrence is racking up wins for best actress this year. For, though her acting was great in this movie, it seems a step below some of the recent vintage, Natalie Portman in "Black Swan" Helen Mirriem in "The Queen" immediately come to mind, but perhaps there was no other perfect role for a woman this year, though I'll take a flier on Emmanuel Riva in Armour if anyone else has seen it. (I'm also ruling out Quvenzhane Wallis for "Beasts of the Southern Wild) because she's too young to run around winning Oscars).

The movie is extremely adept at navigating through a variety of different genres. My companion said it reminded her of The Royal Tenenbaums, which seemed like an apt comparison in a lot of ways. The two movies are not entirely alike, but they do both travel from familial to specific love relationships with a mixture of laughter and legitimate emotion. I think RT's pitch is set a bit lower. I don't recall crying any of the three times I've watched it, and SLP got me once, and nearly a couple of other times, for the primary reason that the characters were sort of falling apart and experiencing something more viscerally, a state of being to the world that was less affectation than a legitimate sort of weariness or pain that is part and parcel with being a living and breathing human being in this flawed world of ours.

And now we must talk about the ending, or something approaching the ending, which worked nearly as well. For the record, the ending was fine. I'm always a fan of narrative arcs that end true to the format or structures that they've laid forth during the course of the film. SLP ended fine, maybe well, but right before it ended it did something near brilliant. It had a dance. A dance scene that managed to bring together the strangeness of the Philly family who loves football and gambling being deeply vested in a dancing competition, along with real drama as Sal dances in front of his estranged wife and his new interest, Tiffany. Thus, we have comedy and drama existing simultaneously. And Russell, who is either no fool or supremely lucky to have stars who can't quite dance, puts together an amazing dance scene that serves as a wonderful metaphor for the entire movie. We have some Charleston, some booty shaking, a failed lift, a passable waltz all jammed in to a spectacular small scene. The audience doesn't know what to expect because we haven't seen the two dance much. And so it's a surprise, as much of the movie was, to see what these two people had constructed, and it was exactly the sort of strange and weird and funny and sweet kind of dance that Russell was playing with the entire movie. How can you be both funny and sad, sweet and serious. How many times can a character physically hurt someone or himself before we stop rooting for him? How many times can a female lead be self-destructive or manipulative before we start hoping she'll disappear as well? I don't know, but I do know that Russell made a movie successful enough to make me wonder while still having me deeply vested at the end. Bravo.