Silver Linings Playbook
First screened in November 2012 / Most recently screened and reviewed in June 2024
Director: David O. Russell. Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, Ron Ortiz, Paul Herman, Shea Whigham, Julia Stiles, Dash Mihok, Patrick McDade, Brea Bee. Screenplay: David O. Russell (based on the novel by Matthew Quick).

 Twitter Capsule: (Nov 2012) Acting from the gut. Writing from Jupiter. Direction highly erratic. Camera no help. Cooper easily MVP.

Second Capsule: (Jun 2024) I've brightened on the movie considerably now that it's freed from Oscar talk. Uneven but sprightly comedy.

VOR: ③  Well shy of any leading edge of invention, but manages to revive both the nostalgia and the scrappiness of 30s Hollywood with very modern flavor.


 
Photo © 2012 The Weinstein Company /
Mirage Enterprises
About two-thirds of the way through, in the wake of a tailgate party gone wrong, Silver Linings Playbook collects its entire ensemble into one room for the first time. At that point, plotting and genre and character motive all start feeling false. Even the performances start to suffer a little from all the newly creaky mechanics, with their abrupt insistence on relatively conventional romantic-comedy tropes that Silver Linings has thus far impressively eschewed. Act III suggests either a screenwriting lapse or a Weinstein imposition, haphazardly cut together, with an extra stinger of undoing anything impressive or halfway honest about the movie's handling of mental illness to that point.

Before all that, though, Silver Linings Playbook is a very rare thing in 21st-century Hollywood: a comedy genuinely rooted in character, rather than premise or gimmick or template or plot. The cleverly, creatively assembled cast comes through royally on that assignment. Cooper, especially, sails high over the warped bar of a protagonist who shouldn't work at all, in part because he genuinely obeys the edict, oft professed but rarely fulfilled, not to play the comedy for laughs (and thereby gets quite a few). Another reason is that he's a formidably resourceful performer and scene-partner who deserves way more respect than he gets, and another is that no role has ever taken fuller advantage of his trademark duality of disarming openness and impregnable, at times disconcerting remove.

I wouldn't want every movie to be quite this full of antic camera movements and entropic, mismatched edits, but in this case, they furnish a zippy and persuasive stylistic correlative to the film's thesis on life as fly-by-the-seat-of-your-sweatpants improvisation, where the last thing you want is to get stuck on an idée fixe: whether of a lover, a relative, a family, a regimen, or however you might be defining "healthy adulthood." (Though also, try to be healthy, or healthier! And pass at least partially for an adult when you can!) If your whole life is about getting all your remote controls facing in the same direction—on your end table, or in your relationship, or whatever—this movie is begging you to reconsider. It's plucky and filled with laughs but also seems to be working from halfway-sober experience.

Meanwhile, families on U.S. movie screens are rarely this full of such plausible oddballs, each with their own rhythms and energies, their own reads on whatever situation they're currently in, all of which get ample showcase from David O. Russell's direction and Jay Cassidy's assembly. It's also rare to see a family in a broadly jovial vehicle whose wounds, worries, even bouts of violence are given real weight; we're kind of in Home for the Holidays territory here, or close enough to count. Silver Linings Playbook doesn't just have a cast, or a list of characters. It has its own eccentric notion of "community," neither utopic nor cynical, equal parts chaos and weird stability. I don't know if Mandy Moore choreographed the perfect climactic dance routine for this script and this movie—one element of Act III that does work as well as it needs to, or nearly so—or if Russell instead constructed just the right, warts-and-all film as a mirror for that dance number. Whichever led, the other followed. Neither is a perfect 10, or even all that close, but it averages to way higher than a 5. Grade: B

(in November 2012: C+)
Academy Award Nominations and Winners:
Best Picture
Best Director: David O. Russell
★Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence
Best Actor: Bradley Cooper
Best Supporting Actress: Jacki Weaver
Best Supporting Actor: Robert De Niro
Best Adapted Screenplay: David O. Russell
Best Film Editing: Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
★Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Jennifer Lawrence
Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Bradley Cooper
Best Screenplay: David O. Russell

Other Awards:
Toronto International Film Festival: People's Choice Award
Screen Actors Guild Awards: Best Actress (Lawrence)
Film Independent Spirit Awards: Best Feature; Best Director; Best Actress (Lawrence); Best Screenplay
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Actress (Lawrence; tie)
National Board of Review: Best Actor (Cooper); Best Adapted Screenplay
British Academy Awards (BAFTAs): Best Adapted Screenplay
Permalink Home 2012 ABC E-Mail