Silver Linings Playbook - review

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are lost souls who find each other in a screwball comedy that offers a refreshing take on mental illness
p39 p40 p41 films
4 February 2013

David O Russell, the writer and director of this film, likes a scrap. He almost came to blows with George Clooney when he was directing him in Three Kings. There’s an amazing minute of video on YouTube where he completely loses it with Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees, screaming abuse, smashing stuff. His last film, The Fighter, with Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, was not just about boxing but fighting in every way, both within the family and without.

Silver Linings Playbook (an awkward title, better truncated just to Silver Linings) is about fighting your way, too. Pat (Bradley Cooper, intent, scary but completely winning, better in this than anything he’s done before) lost it when he found his wife in the shower with another teacher. He beat the guy up so badly that he avoided jail only by a plea-bargain, accepting long-term treatment in an institution for his previously undiagnosed bipolar disorder — his estranged wife taking out a restraining order against him none the less.

Having lost his job, his wife and his home, Pat comes home after eight months to live with his sports-mad, amateur bookie OCD dad, Pat Sr (Robert de Niro, delivering in full again, at last) and hopeful Mom (Jacki Weaver from Animal Kingdom, just one of the great frog-faces). He’s convinced that if only he works at it enough — reading the books she teaches, getting in shape — can he win his wife back. “If you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining,” he says. He’s deluded.

Then he meets Tiffany. She’s Jennifer Lawrence in her first big adult role, following on from Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games. She was 21 when this was filmed (Bradley Cooper is 37 but neither of them are particularly acting their age here) and she’s bewitching in it. Tiffany, recently widowed, is at least as mad as Pat, neither of them having any filter on what they say or do. Told not to ask Tiffany about her husband, Pat immediately demands: “How did Tommy die?” Soon they’re swapping details of their medication. Then she says she doesn’t like his football shirt but he can f**k her if he turns the lights off.

You might just find Silver Linings a bit dodgy if what you want in a film is ceaseless social responsibility, playing as it does with serious mental illness, not accurate about the grim reality of that (in the novel the movie is based on, Pat has been hospitalised for years, not months). But lunacy is just a mode here (albeit one that you can guess David O Russell to have his own affinity with), for this movie is best appreciated as a late great addition to the genre of screwball comedy. And it’s not just Pat and Tiffany who speak out with alarming directness — everybody in the film does, resulting in tremendous rows and confrontations. They are what this film loves. Russell actually participates in them all through the camera work — it’s dodging in there, weaving around, jabbing right into people’s faces.

So boy meets girl — the outcome of that can be guessed but it’s held back for almost the whole length of the movie. There’s a plot to work through, corny enough. Pat needs Tiffany to give a letter to his wife, whom he’s not allowed to contact. She needs him to join her in training for a dance competition, her big project. They trade. Pat Sr ends up betting the house on how well they’ll do on the big night. There’s a heck of a lot about American football (the Philadelphia Eagles) en route, a mystery to many of us.

But the scene-by-scene texture of this film is completely enthralling throughout, at once nervy and abrasive and touchingly romantic. (Most male film critics are routinely unjust to romcoms, I’ve concluded, for reasons that they don’t care to make explicit but may not be far to seek, although too sad to insist on.) You don’t want this movie to end and you don’t want its stars to go.

Jennifer Lawrence is a complete revelation. It’s going to be so good to see what she does next (after getting her Oscar). In her previous films, playing a girl, she’s seemed strong, stoical and self-contained but here she’s an aggressive, vulnerable adult, erratic and full of guile. And she looks amazing — that full-cheeked, oval face, that porcelain complexion, those eyes. She and Cooper keep staring at each other or into each other in the most intent way, having both dispensed with the social niceties. You can believe it.

When I first saw this film at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year, I gave it four stars, perhaps a bit cagily. It went on to win the Audience Award there, a good one to get, voted for by actual paying cinema-goers. Seeing it a second time has made me love it even more, not always the case. For sure David O Russell has a temper but that’s because he has a big heart all round. Go see.

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