Movies/Reviews

Silver Linings Playbook is chugging into cinemas here on the strength of excellent reviews and great word of mouth. It's been hailed as a fresh, original screwball comedy for our times - a miraculous blend of rom-com and psychological drama that manages to be complex, dark and funny all at once. There's certainly quite a lot of truth to that. But director David O. Russell has also written his latest effort into the proverbial corner: struggling beneath the weight of too many genres and tonal shifts, the film that emerges is good but also feels like a bit of a mess.

Bradley Cooper plays the volatile, vulnerable Pat, a man who's been thoroughly felled by heartbreak, rage and bipolar disorder. He convinces his loving mom Dolores (Jacki Weaver) that he's ready to leave the mental institution and return home to be with his family, including his football-obsessed dad Pat Sr (Robert De Niro). But all Pat can think about is his ex-wife Nikki (Brea Bee), the reason he suffered a mental breakdown in the first place. Then he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young widow with her own emotional baggage who offers him the opportunity to reconnect with Nikki... but only if he'll help her out too.

 

By rights, there is nothing funny at all about Pat's rocky road to recovery. He is a simmering mess of neuroses and misery, ready to boil over at any minute, refusing to let go of the past and move on, reluctant to take his meds and get better. There's nothing remotely amusing about Pat's rage and restraining order, and it's worrying how tightly he clings to the belief that he can resuscitate the marriage he literally pummelled to death. Tiffany, too, is no less troubled, trading her pain for promiscuity and pills. Their relationship is an unconventional one that trades on a perplexing mix of lies, insults and brutal amounts of honesty.

To his credit, Russell manages to make his off-kilter, occasionally deeply unlikeable characters work, and they are the best part of the entire film. He gently teases out what offbeat humour there is in Pat's situation, without sacrificing character development or complexity. A lesser writer would have turned Pat's problems - his rage and restraining order - into adorable quirks that can be easily dismissed the moment a hint of new love enters his life. In Silver Linings Playbook, Pat remains resolutely, almost grimly real, inching towards recovery more out of necessity than choice.

The trouble is that the different elements of the film just don't quite add up to a coherent whole. The movie spends too much of its running time teetering uncomfortably between comedy and drama - and, as a result, never really succeeds as either. It can't comfortably lead us down into a dark abyss of melodrama, and yet laughing too hard at Pat's genuinely deep-seated emotional problems feels wrong too. By the time the ending rolls around, it feels like a moment out of a completely different film - one in which logic, character and depth don't matter as much as they have in the rest of the movie.

Where Russell's film succeeds unreservedly is in its excellent cast. Cooper is cursed as much as well-served by his good looks, but here he proves that he can dominate the screen with a performance at once touching and disturbing. Lawrence is so assured as Tiffany that her 16-year age gap with Cooper is barely noticeable. It's nice to see De Niro thoroughly enjoying himself as well. His career has taken a pretty questionable turn in the past decade, but he's fantastic here as Pat's superstitious, obsessive-compulsive father - a delightful, kooky counterpoint to his son, and a reminder that the difference between 'crazy' and normal people is sometimes just a clinical diagnosis.

 

In the final analysis, Silver Linings Playbook is smart, challenging, and hopelessly difficult to quantify. There's no doubt that Russell has done excellent work with his broken characters, developing them into real, recognisable people with problems that don't just magically disappear... except when the credits roll. He certainly can't be faulted for effort or ambition, even if the final film doesn't quite come together as a whole and instead winds up wandering in a no-man's land between comedy and tragedy.

Summary: A curious romantic comedy that's equal parts gritty, awkward and desperately sad.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Shawne Wang