Silver Linings Playbook

Film (2012)

With Bradley Cooper (Pat), Jennifer Lawrence (Tiffany), Robert De Niro (Pat Sr.), Jacki Weaver (Dolores), Chris Tucker (Danny)

Having recently spent some time interned in a mental institution, a former teacher, Pat (Bradley Cooper) faces the prospect of rebuilding his life. At home with his parents, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), a bookie, and Dolores (Jacki Weaver), he pines for his estranged wife, hoping to rebuild their relationship as soon as he can rebuild his own life. In the course of things, he meets a young woman named Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), with whom he forges a mutually supportive, though not uncomplicated, friendship.

This odd film makes an attempt to deal with the serious issue of mental illness while packaging it in the form of an offbeat comedy. Though the idea is not entirely implausible, the challenges to fuse these diverse narrative energies are significant, and the result here, unfortunately, is strangely inconsistent. In the end, the film neither works as a comedy nor as a conscientious treatment of mental illness. The result is a treatment that means to be existentially ironic but that winds up being offhand and casual in a way that feels inadequate to its theme.

Bradley Cooper comes across as goofily aimless rather than tragically beset by mental illness, though we know from the narrative that the character’s behavior has historic severities that Cooper’s hapless, rather than fraught, portrayal does not convey.

Robert De Niro is a great actor with a long and successful resume who, in quite a few recent films, has fallen into a kind of offhand comedic style that does not always work. In explicitly farcical films like Meet The Parents (2000) and its endless sequels, this style is appropriate and sometimes quite funny. Here it feels out of place. His obsessive-compulsive character is supposed to be funny, especially around the issue of betting, but it is also supposed to have explanatory power. It winds up not really being either; this sad-but-supposed-to-be-funny character does not really work in either way, due more to the misconceptions of the writing than to De Niro’s performance.

Jackie Weaver plays Pat Sr.’s wife, a variant of Edith Bunker on the 1970s TV classic, All In the Family, seemingly ditzy but with more on the ball underneath. She is okay in the role, but, again, her airheadedness is meant to be funny, but, in the context of the more serious themes, seems like a bad gag.

The real standout here is Jennifer Lawrence, a truly remarkable young actress. Her performance in Winter’s Bone (2010) was stunning and amazingly captivating. Here, despite the liabilities of a script with inconsistent tone and episodic direction, she does a wonderful job. Her Tiffany has power and charisma and, as far as I am concerned, she carries the entire film.

The writing makes an effort to show complicated personalities facing dramatic challenges and hoping to rise to the occasion. In the end, however, the result feels like a hodgepodge, hoping to be an offbeat romantic comedy, but too offhand about its difficult subject to pull it off.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), a much less touted but far better film, deals with questions of mental illness and frames them in a context that has appropriate moments of lightness. The result there is an eloquent, and, in many ways, heartening treatment of difficult themes. Silver Linings Playbook rides along only on Jennifer Lawrence’s intense and evocative performance while delivering very little of the same sort of satisfaction.

– BADMan