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  1. Culture
22 November 2012updated 14 Sep 2021 3:40pm

Silver Linings Playbook – review

The excess baggage in this film is thankfully relieved by Robert De Niro's grumpy-funny turn.

By Ryan Gilbey

Silver Linings Playbook (15)
dir: David O Russell

It’s clear that the hero and heroine of Silver Linings Playbook are made for one another from the moment they meet. He asks her immediately how her husband died, having been warned not to raise the topic, while she quizzes him about the medication he’s on now that he has been discharged from a mental institution. It turns out they’ve both taken many of the same meds. Small world! He is Pat (Bradley Cooper), trying to put his life back together after being found guilty of a violent attack on his wife’s lover. She is Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), whose response to bereavement has been to sleep around at the office, drawing the line only at the coffee machine.

Of course, Pat and Tiffany don’t know they are right for each other. They’re in a film, whereas we are watching one and have doubtless seen many such odd-couple stories of love among the antidepressants (Benny and Joon, say, or Mike Figgis’s underrated Mr Jones). Hollywood’s attitude towards mental illness has typically been patronising or simplistic but then so has its attitude towards most disabilities. Why should the mentally ill get special privileges? Silver Linings Playbook is no exception, though it does have instances of authentic feeling distinct from its ingratiating tone.

After leaving hospital, Pat moves in with his parents, who have their own problems – his mother (Jacki Weaver) is jittery; his father (Robert De Niro) has more than his share of superstitions and OCD. Pat’s friend Ronnie (John Ortiz) is falling apart from the effort of pretending that all is dandy in his life. “People like Tiffany and me, maybe we know something,” Pat decides, and the film seems to concur. The writer-director David O Russell peddles the line that anyone declared to be suffering from a mental illness has simply got their diagnosis ahead of the rest of us.

That’s not to say Pat doesn’t have conspicuous issues. He talks a mile a minute and kids himself that he and his wife are working on their marriage, overlooking the restraining order she has against him. He expresses his dissatisfaction with A Farewell to Arms by throwing the book out of the window, which would be fine if he opened the window first. His is a photogenic condition that manifests itself in charming eccentricity – ordering cereal on a dinner date, exercising overenthusiastically while wearing a bin liner – rather than in drooling and swaying. When Pat suffers a relapse, the script piles on the mitigating circumstances. He keeps his temper in check after seeing his psychiatrist racially insulted. He holds back even when the man is assaulted. But once the miscreants start on Pat’s brother –well, that’s too much. Let us be grateful no one saw fit to add an injured orphan into the mix.

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It’s disappointing to find such cautious filmmaking from Russell, who has in the past aimed for the funny bone via the cerebral cortex rather than the tear ducts or the heartstrings. His 1994 debut, Spanking the Monkey, a breezy story of mother-son incest, announced a talent for finding comic tensions in dysfunctional families.

Russell pursued this in the screwball adoption comedy Flirting With Disaster (1996) and The Fighter (2010), a boxing movie in which the most electrifying spats were verbal and domestic. So it follows that the strongest moments in Silver Linings Playbook arise when large groups of people are barking and bantering in humdrum living rooms, lit by the cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi with celebratory brightness. (He shoots the whole film in a kind of beige dazzle.)

Cooper, known primarily for the vulgar Hangover films, nails Pat’s mania but not the mournful side of the character. Lawrence, who at 22 has given enough outstanding performances (Winter’s Bone, The Hunger Games) to seem like a veteran already, is nicely abrasive.

The biggest surprise comes from De Niro, whose previous comedy work has drawn from a shallow well: however amusing he was in Midnight Run or Analyse This, he was being grumpy-funny, De Niro-funny. Playing Pat Sr, he locates in himself a lightness that has no overlap with his past roles. In proving that it is possible to cast off cumbersome baggage, he expresses in his gentle performance the same message that the film takes two hours and much superfluous huffing and puffing to convey.

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