Silver Linings Playbook Blu-ray Review
Crazy is as crazy does.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 19, 2013
Medical science has made amazing, almost miraculous, progress over the past century or so, and yet the mysteries of
mental illness are still largely baffling even to those who spend their professional careers researching them. We live in
an era of pharmacological overkill, where syndromes are
seemingly invented just so they can be treated with drugs, something not necessarily limited to mental disorders but
which has become the latest in a long line of psychiatric techniques that seem to
be revisited every couple of decades or so, with previous techniques being discarded as barbarian and whatever the
new
wonder treatment of the moment is being hailed as the ultimate cure all that mental health professionals have been
searching for for so long. And yet no one really seems to completely comprehend what causes various mental illnesses,
perhaps one of the most salient reasons that many don't know quite how to treat them. One of the things that makes
Silver Linings Playbook so viscerally entertaining is that it doesn't dwell on the causes of mental illness, delving
instead into the behaviors of several characters who are labeled with a garden variety of syndromes including OCD,
Bipolar and Depression. The film is notable for being one of the oddest quasi-romantic comedies to come down the pike
in
quite a while, one colored with outbursts of shocking violence that just as quickly subside into weird moments of
domestic
dysfunction as well as awkward attempts at making relatively normal human connections. Both Matthew Quick, the
author of the source novel which inspired
the
film, as well as David O. Russell, who adapted the novel for film and directed as well, have histories with depression and
mental illness, either personally or by dint of close relatives being sufferers.
The film begins with Pat Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) reciting a monologue that he seems to have rehearsed a
lot,
and while the context isn't immediately clear, it's obvious that Pat is in the throes of some sort of relationship turmoil. It
soon is revealed that Pat is actually a patient at a Baltimore psychiatric institution, though his mother Dolores (Jacki
Weaver) has just shown up to sign him out of the facility after eight months. The doctors at the place aren't completely
convinced that Pat is ready to matriculate back into civilian life, but Pat's mom won't take "no" for an answer. As she
starts to drive Pat away,
another patient named Danny (Chris Tucker) is waiting in the parking lot for a ride, and
Pat
convinces his mom to let his buddy ride along. In a none too surprising turn of events, Dolores gets a phone call from
the
institution alerting her to the fact that Danny is in fact an escapee, at which point Dolores questions whether she
should
have come to "spring" Pat out at all. Danny agrees to return, but urges Dolores to let Pat stay free, assuring her that
Pat
is cured of whatever mysterious ailment plagued him previously. And so Dolores and Pat head off to their middle class
Philadelphia home.
Pat's home life is odd, to say the least. One of the chief strands of current psychiatric thinking is that many mental
illnesses have at least a partly genetic component, and it's obvious that Pat, Jr. has a case to be made in that regard,
for his father Patrizio (Robert De Niro) is a poster child for obsessive compulsive disorder. Patrizio (Pat Sr.) is a football
addict who is convinced that only a rote series of behaviors will result in his beloved Philadelphia Eagles winning their
games. These "requirements" include exact positioning of the television remotes and most importantly Pat Jr.'s
viewership, since Pat Sr. has concluded that his son is a good luck charm of sorts. Pat Jr. had long acceded to his
father's weird demands, but now that he's out of the institution he has only one goal on his mind: reuniting with his
estranged wife Nikki. That instantly puts him at odds with his father, and in a way his mother as well, for Sunday
football game watching has been a Solitano family tradition for years, a community building exercise that has created
some of the family's fondest communal memories.
Pat has another, perhaps more reasonable, requirement in his life, namely to attend regular therapy sessions, and in
it's his first meeting with his new therapist Dr. Patel (Anupam Kher) that finally gives us our first real insight into what's
going on in Pat's muddled mind. The Muzak playing in the good doctor's lobby sends Pat into a sudden rage, and it
turns out that the doctor had played it intentionally to see if it was still a "trigger" for Pat's violent tendencies (this is
one of the film's few questionable plot devices). It turns out that the event that ended up getting Pat put away for
eight months involved Pat coming home unexpectedly and finding his wife Nikki in an assignation with a history teacher
at the local school where Nikki and Pat also taught. The two were cavorting to the strains of Stevie Wonder's "My
Cherie Amour", which had been the wedding song for Pat and Nikki, something which sent Pat into an unbridled rage,
resulting in him pummeling the man romancing his wife, almost killing him.
Pat attempts to reconnect to various people in his neighborhood, including a teacher at the school where he used to
teach, leading to some comic interchanges. But Pat also reconnects with a longtime buddy named Ronnie (John Ortiz)
who is married to Veronica (Julia Stiles), a woman who is one of Nikki's closest friends. While Veronica doesn't hide her
inherent dislike for Pat, she relents enough to invite him over for dinner, at which point Pat is introduced to Veronica's
little sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a woman with emotional troubles of her own stemming from the unexpected
death of her husband Tommy, a Philadelphia policeman. Pat and Tiffany make for an instant odd couple. Pat has no
filtering capability and spouts one inappropriate thing after another, while Tiffany exhibits a similar inability to curtail her
roiling inner life and tends to cut right to chase, delivering scathing assessments of everyone she sees.
The second act of the film details the growing relationship between Pat and Tiffany. Halting, weird and bizarrely
affecting, Russell's screenplay makes the most of the wounded aspects of both of these characters. Tiffany's directness
catches Pat completely off guard, but at the same time, Tiffany senses a genuine decency in Pat that she can't deny.
There are a number of subplots that unspool simultaneously in this section, including a frightening manic episode that
Pat suffers, as well as Tiffany's revelations about her own mental instabilities tied to the death of her husband. The film
becomes
completely strange (although lovably so) when Tiffany offers to get a letter from Pat to Nikki
(something which would violate Nikki's restraining order) if Pat will be her partner in a dance contest that Nikki wants to
perform in. What an odd but oddly endearing turn of events.
The film tends to stumble somewhat in its overly contrived final act. Pat Sr., who has lost his job, has taken to
bookmaking to bring in some much needed moolah, and he has made some unwise bets on various Eagles games in
order to bring in enough scratch to start a restaurant. Pat Jr. finds himself torn between helping Tiffany (in order to
reconnect with Nikki) and his father, as his father is desperate to have Pat's involvement in various games in order to
insure a victory. In a cartwheeling series of events, Pat Sr. ends up getting into a "double bet" where the Eagles must
win a game
and Pat Jr. and Tiffany must achieve a decent score in the dance contest in order for Pat Sr. to
reclaim a stack of money he's lost to a betting buddy of his. These elements, along with some increasing melodrama
between Pat and Tiffany, make things rather wildly improbable and perhaps detract, if only slightly, from the film's
momentum (the inclusion of Pat's therapist in a wild scene at the Solitano home after a brouhaha at an Eagles game
pushes the film into pretty dangerous territory from a suspension of disbelief vantage point).
Despite some occasional stumbles and some unanswered questions (did Tiffany ever deliver the letter to Nikki?; is Pat
really staying on antipsychotic meds?; were a couple of characters actually colluding, as is hinted at in a late
scene?),
Silver Linings Playbook is a hugely enjoyable film, one with a
deliberately skewed sense of humor which may shock some people, but which delivers some really hearty laughs along
the way. The performances by Cooper and Lawrence have been rightfully lauded. Lawrence, whom I singled out years
ago as a breakout star in
Winter's
Bone, correctly predicting she'd snare an Oscar nomination for that role, becomes a force to be reckoned with
in this role. She's funny, sad, vulnerable, tough as nailssometimes all within the same scene. Cooper is undeniably
winning in an equally diverse role. Pat is obviously a well meaning individual struggling with some major demons. The
character's ardent wish for a storybook happy ending may not be realistic (something the film itself gives into, despite
its allusions to grittier, less sanguine, works like the novels of Ernest Hemingway), but it's a universal desire that
virtually everyone can relate to, even if they don't suffer from any ostensible emotional difficulties.
