Silver Linings Playbook

The first truly great romantic comedy of the millennium has finally arrived. Silver Linings Playbook presents itself as part dysfunctional-family comedy and part illness-drama, but it is, without a doubt, a full-blown Hollywood rom-com. I’m stunned that the director who found the magic ingredient for rejuvenating this ailing, once-great genre is David O. Russell.  I normally find his sardonic social-commentary comedies (“social com-coms?”), like Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, too manic to fully enjoy. But it turns out that a touch of mania is exactly what's been needed to make the rom-com credible again--not gross-out humor, not mock-sincerity, not male-bonding bros, not self-referential homages, not talking CGI bears, not wistful attempts to recapture the 1980s, and not any of the other elements that filmmakers have been vainly injecting into this genre for the last twelve years.

In our ironic age, the romantic comedy has been reduced to something that can only be accepted as a saccharine, guilty pleasure. Any film with real sincerity has been widely rejected by audiences of the past decade, and screwball comedies have had to be rendered so over-the-top and shocking that, although structured like rom-coms, they never earn their inevitably saccharine emotional payoffs. We live in an age in which ridiculous and credulity-defying fantasy and science-fiction movies about superheroes and zombies are praised as deep, metaphorical philosophy, but movies about actual people who behave in the slightly heightened ways that are traditional of movie characters are dismissed as “unrealistic.” While this type of criticism is maddening to me, it is true that, these days, making a film that works on a structural level without it feeling tired and formulaic is very difficult. Silver Linings Playbook accomplishes this by taking itself seriously while never pretending to be anything more than a Hollywood entertainment. It never panders to the audience, it doesn’t try to shock with cheap gags, and it doesn’t try to reinvent or deconstruct its genre.

This is a funny film about a serious subject.  Its characters deal with mental illness, grief, familial disharmony, and the loss of loved ones. In short, there's something that anyone living in America today can relate to--it’s been a shitty few years in this country and we want our movie characters to have had a shitty year too. The film is formulaic and “unrealistic” in ways that would bother most modern audiences, as well as being intentionally tense and jarring, but in a balanced way that feels just right.  I would normally find it hard to praise any movie that is above putting its credits or even the title at the top of the film but, in this case, that choice is part of what places the audience into the film's off-kilter mindset. The presentation is often unsettling but that is necessary to fully understand not only the main character, a 30-something recently released from a mental institution who seems like he could snap at any minute, but every other dysfunctional character as well.  These over-the-top personalities can't obscure the real human truth the film offers, and there is an undeniable emotional honesty in the theme of getting outside of one’s head to connect with the rest of the world. 

Bradley Cooper (an actor I've never cared for) gives a strong and centered lead performance, and the supporting cast is even better. The wonderful young actress Jennifer Lawrence (of Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games) finally gets a role with meaty dialogue and proves she's no flash in the pan.  With her deep and expressive eyes, she succeeds beautifully in playing a character much older than her actual age, and she conveys a powerful combination of aggression and vulnerability, both physical and verbal. Robert DeNiro plays yet another wacky dad, but this time he goes for simple truth rather than big laughs, and the great Jackie Weaver makes the rather thankless role of the "coping mother" into something special, creating a genuinely funny character whose pain we can really feel and understand.

A gem of a movie!