On paper, I am supposed to hate Silver Linings Playbook with every fiber of my being. It's a quirky romantic comedy, starring actors who became famous in blockbusters (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) trying to prove their acting chops by playing wounded, slightly daffy characters. There's a bunch of sappy side plots, too — a once-distant father who just wants to be close to his son, an Indian psychiatrist who's a rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan, a meth-head with a heart of gold. I should hate all of them. The plot hinges on a dancing competition, for chrissake. Even writing it down now, after having seen the film, I'm stunned that I didn't flee the theater. I'm still kind of amazed. How is it possible that I loved this movie?
Part of the answer has to be the acting. Screw Lincoln. This movie is easily the best ensemble performance of the year. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence both fully acquit themselves in roles that could easily have become unbearably grating. Robert De Niro plays an Italian-American father without the New York bluster, and it is one of my favorite of his performances, period. He's ground down and confused and tender and not tough at all. At the Toronto Film Festival, where this movie won the people's choice award, often handed out to Oscar sleepers like Slumdog Millionaire, the general consensus was that De Niro deserved Best Supporting Actor for his performance. It's a reasonable possibility. This movie also sees the return of Chris Tucker, in a sadly miniscule part, as the aforementioned meth-head with a heart of gold. The moment he appears onscreen, all you want to do is see more of him. Quentin Tarantino has recently claimed that he's only going to make three more movies. We can only hope that one of the three is set aside for Tucker. Robert De Niro doesn't get upstaged that often onscreen. Chris Tucker does it to him twice in this movie.
I've argued before that quirkiness in American culture is often a way of pretending to be original while remaining happily and utterly conventional. Though Silver Linings Playbook is definitely quirky, that equation does not apply here. The movie flouts conventions from beginning to end, becoming in the process one of the most subtle, most sophisticated movies about mental illness ever made. Madness in the movies, and in art generally, usually takes one of two forms. In serious work, madness is a kind of glamorous otherworldliness, a portal into deeper perception. Of course, as anyone who has actually been close to anyone with real mental illness knows, the insane are not glamorous. They are terribly, terribly dull, except that their dullness is shot through with moments of pure terror. The first half of Silver Linings Playbook focuses on portraying exactly this difficult reality, the grind of trying to get somebody's mind back together, the grim setbacks, the tepid successes, the sudden collapses. This is a courageous move, because the clichés of glamorous madness are so prevalent and so easy, and they make for so much more pleasant and comforting a viewing experience.
But Silver Linings Playbook is at least half-comedy as well, a genre with its own insane approach to insanity. The romantic comedy has always relied on "zaniness" and other forms of muted craziness to make characters sympathetic. The Onion captured the ludicrous cliché perfectly with "Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested." The movie comes dangerously close to falling into this chasm, where we love the characters because of their damaged natures, and their irrational antics are treated as "learning to be yourself." But, in the end, the redemption the characters achieve — this is, after all, a David O. Russell movie — is much more reserved and quiet than in a typical romantic comedy. The aura of forgiveness that permeates the ending is played in a minor key. The movie stays true to itself. The happy ending really is only a silver lining. The clouds are still looming.
It takes guts to make a movie that avoids the easy clichés of mental health — resisting the glamour of self-destruction as much as redemption. This spirit is reflected in the characters as much as in the movie itself. They come to recognize the perilous closeness of tragedy and comedy in the struggle to build a life out of internal catastrophe. According to some reports, one in five Americans is currently on medication for a psychiatric disorder, which makes the story in Silver Linings Playbook, sadly, not all that uncommon. That new reality makes Silver Linings Playbook not just one of the year's most refreshing movies, but one of its most necessary.
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