David O. Russell's film Silver Linings Playbook defies pigeonholing. It has been billed by some as a romantic comedy, but considering this is a film about people with psychiatric issues falling in love, it would be downright wrong to compare it to such light and fluffy fare as Sleepless in Seattle. Also, the last film I can think of that featured a romance between two people with mental issues, The Other Sister, took the hallmark-card approach and turned out to be a complete dungfest. It would not be fair to call the film a dramedy, either, because that would simply conjure up images of so many late-90s early 00's TV shows without really showing just how nuanced this movie is.
Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), a former high-school substitute teacher, has just spent eight months in a mental hospital, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder shortly after he nearly beat to death his wife's lover upon finding the two of them in the shower together. He goes home to his father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) and his mother Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and remains intent on winning back his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) despite the fact that she has taken out a restraining order on him. He gets in shape, mainly by running (it is hinted but never shown that he used to be overweight), he reads the books that Nikki teaches to her high school class, even though some of them, such as Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, upset him to the point of having episodes of anger. His parents try to talk him out of his quest, and Pat Sr. repeatedly tries to get him to watch football games with him, claiming that Pat Jr. is a good luck charm for their home team, the Philadelphia Eagles.
As he tries to settle back into his old life, Pat Jr. meets up with an old friend, Ronnie (John Ortiz), whose wife Veronica (Julia Stiles) a co-teacher of Nikki's, invites Pat to dinner. There, he meets Veronica's sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) a widow who has also recently lost her job. Tiffany, like Pat, is a former mental patient, having been a sex addict, and in fact she propositions him on the night they meet, making Pat extremely uncomfortable, and he leaves. He encounters her again and often, though, as she apparently jogs the same route as he does. On the advice of his psychiatrist (Anupam Kher), Pat befriends Tiffany, who then offers to help him by giving Nikki a letter from him. In exchange, however, she wants him to be her partner for a dance competition.
Caught between his own obsession with winning back his wife, his father's preoccupation with his own superstitions (he bets money on an Eagles game in order to win enough money to put up a restaurant and get out of bookmaking, and Pat Jr. becomes instrumental to his winning the bet) his extremely rigorous dance training with Tiffany and his growing attraction to her, Pat finds himself learning a lot more about life, love and family than he would have ever imagined possible.
To my mind, a good portion of this film is a somewhat stressful viewing experience. Pat Jr.'s bipolar disorder is put on full display, and his shouting episodes and verbal exchanges with Tiffany that resulted in her yelling made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. It's actually testimony to Cooper's acting that he is able to evoke such feelings of discomfort because I, for one, completely bought his performance. It was particularly easy to empathize with him because the incident that put him in the hospital was one which could drive just about anyone to violence; in Philippine law he could actually have killed both his wife and her lover in that instant and gotten off with an extremely light penalty, plea of insanity or not. Not only that, but his love for his wife and his desire to win her back feel genuine and earnest, even though the audience and every other character in the film know that there's little to no chance of that actually happening.
Jennifer Lawrence, who received an Oscar for her performance, doesn't take her character off the deep end like Cooper does, but gives a richly nuanced performance as the widow of a policeman who dealt with the grief of her loss by having sex with everything that moved. As young as Lawrence is, there's a real depth to her character, an effect she achieves by delivering a performance that is judiciously understated. One of the scenes in which she really shines is the one in which she tells Pat Jr. how her husband, Tommy, died. There are no histrionics, no raised voices, and no tears, but Lawrence conveys the dull ache of losing someone she loves in that scene; it's possibly some of the most powerful interplay between the two characters, and Cooper picks up the ball and runs with it. The chemistry between these two is astounding, and they play these roles perfectly.
Another perfect bit of chemistry is evident in the performances of De Niro and Weaver as Pat Sr. and Dolores, Pat's loving parents. Their characters have it the worst as they catch the brunt of Pat's episodes, of which there are more than one throughout the film, and the way they portray their characters' love for their poor son is one of the more touching parts of the movie; I'm a fan of family dynamics that are played out well, and this has to be one of the best I've seen in awhile. They're also at the center of one of the film's few plot twists, arguably the best one. Like I said, the parts of the film that have Pat shouting and basically letting his illness get the better of him are pretty tough to sit through, but De Niro's Pat Sr. and Jacki Weaver's Dolores help ease things a little bit.
A truly pleasant surprise here was a wonderfully low-key performance Chris Tucker as Danny, Pat's best friend from the mental hospital. Yes, I'm talking about Chris "Rush Hour" Tucker, who finally demonstrates that he can actually act, or do anything that doesn't involve yelling at Jackie Chan or doing a shriller version of Eddie Murphy. It wasn't quite award-worthy in the same way that the performances of his costars were but it was nicely nuanced and if this is the kind of performance audiences can expect from Tucker I would genuinely like to see him in more movies.
Credit goes to Russell, for whom this film is apparently very personal considering his own son has been diagnosed as bipolar (and who has even been described as bipolar himself by George Clooney, who worked with him on 1999's Three Kings, an experience he reportedly described as one of the worst of his life) who extracted such fine performances from so many actors and who even wrote their lines. He took a really brave approach to a complex, very difficult story to tackle and managed to come up with something wonderful.
Ultimately, enduring Pat's hardship vicariously is worth it, and though I won't spoil the ending, suffice it to say that this is one thing the film has in common with the more traditional romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle or While You Were Sleeping. The thing about this movie is that, more than any of the other "rom coms" I actually felt, upon coming to the satisfying ending, that I had earned it.
4.5/5
