Review: "Silver Linings Playbook"

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012)

A friend of mine described Silver Linings in a rather denigrating light: to him, the film is a dangerous fairytale typical of Hollywood, saying that all you need to get over mental illness is just to find a hot girl.

Well, I must respectfully disagree.
As someone who happens to have been diagnosed as bipolar, the film doesn't say to me that two broken people need to find love in order to get 'better'. Instead, it's suggesting that we can find love, too. This is a rather big difference, and it's why Silver Linings was such a cathartic delight for me.

So, where to begin? (Strangely enough, as I write this, I've begun to have a hypomanic burst. How fitting!) Well, how about the film's most acclaimed piece, Jennifer Lawrence's lived-in performance as Tiffany. What struck me about Lawrence is that this seems like a better, more real version of the ever-present "manic pixie dream girl" that Hollywood 'indie' cinema loves to throw at us. She's rough,  she doesn't care what you think of her but will strike at your core with her bitter tantrums. The praise is well-deserved.
But I was particularly impressed with Cooper. The physicality of the role, with a real sense of what mania is like, struck me. Pat's mania is one that is often marked by what seems to be aggression, and the character indeed does lash out at points, but Cooper and Russell take care to not conflate the two. (Just because someone's manic doesn't mean that they're aggressive, and when someone with bipolar is aggressive or angry, it doesn't always mean they're manic.) Perhaps something that is 'missing' from the script is the lethargic periods of depression that many of us with bipolar experience. We do see Pat lounging about on his bed, yes -- but he seems to be the of the especially manic subset of bipolar. (I have met people that are "bipolar", but rarely experience the lows.) Cooper's comedic timing is also excellent, particularly with the conflicting, racing questioning sessions. I laughed out loud many times with these moments, as Cooper and Lawrence verbally spar with one another. It's a delight.
Pat's obsession with Nikki drives him forward, towards something that is magical and hopeful and impossible -- and something that we never really feel he should succeed with. Oftentimes, Cooper's Pat is too unstable for us to wish himself upon anyone else, but we feel for him so much, and his playbook so passionately followed, that we do hope that something, just something, will work out for him. This hope congeals the melodrama's tangles, and a set of coincidences should strike us as too composed to actually work. But it does. Russell's re-invention of genre avoids the ironic cynicism of most postmodern filmmakers, but instead aims for us to fall in love with the formula again. We're not fondly reminiscing as the film throws references at us, but genuinely re-living the experience.

Accurate representations of meltdowns: audial hallucinations, the quick flashes of memory, the claustrophobic extreme wide-angle shots. Russell's cinema has always been able to capture elevated emotional stages, and his experience with this (The Fighter, I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings) is used to rather spectacular effect. But what makes this spectacular is not how flashy it is, but how it's not.

Robert DeNiro's OCD is believable and effective: in his character, I saw echoes of some family members with their subtle obsessions and quirks. He shows us the vulnerability of the character like in his best roles of the past, and instead of Pat Sr. being a caricature or simple punch-line (or even worse, annoying) he's a loveable man, warts and all -- because we see just how much he really loves his family.
Jacki Weaver's role as the mother who keeps it all together may be a stock character, but she breathes in genuine pathos and a delightful Philly accent.  She cautiously believes in her son and in the possibility that he can recover, but not foolishly so. There is a struggle in her as she tries to manage the predictable unpredictability of her son and her husband's mountain of tough-guy quirks. Weaver's Dolores doesn't suffer like a saint, as some actresses or directors would choose, but simply seems like a real mother. This realness is a reoccuring motif in Silver Linings, but one that is mixed with an old-fashioned Hollywood romanticism. It's a precarious balance to strike, but somehow they've done it. How? Well, David O. Russell does have a personal relationship with mental illness and bipolar: his son has the disorder. This love and understanding of someone with the condition really comes through in Silver Linings Playbook.

So we have a family of characters that are both loveable and raw, and they manage to find a happy ending. Who doesn't feel warm and wonderful when this happens in a movie when we want it so badly to happen, and we can believe that we can find such happiness, too? Yes, even us crazies can find love.