Academy Award winner Silver
Linings Playbook makes this year’s list of “movies I got to because of the
Oscars,” and it demonstrates a few important lessons to be learned going into
2013: the romantic comedy as a genre
isn’t as dead as I thought, Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most versatile
actresses around, and Robert De Niro can still act his way through a movie
without phoning it in.
Bradley Cooper stars as bipolar Pat, recently released from a psychiatric hospital after a messy separation with his wife. While trying to reconnect with her in spite of a restraining order, Pat meets troubled widow Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), and the two strike up an unlikely friendship as they attempt to help each other through their problems. Tiffany promises to help Pat reunite with his wife if Pat helps her win a dancing competition – and, incidentally, help his Eagles fan father (De Niro) win a bet in the process.
After The Fighter, this seems like a step away from what I’d come to expect from David O. Russell; the romantic comedy genre is a bit far from the heady biopic which finally won Christian Bale that Oscar. But thank heavens that a fresher voice like Russell’s comes to a genre which has been otherwise formulaic, uninspiring, and often predictably pathetic, matching improbability with impotent self-importance. The romantic comedy is a genre I’d long since written off, the clichés riddling it like so many bullets at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; give me Hepburn and Tracy any day of the week. But Russell does something different here, creating something that still plays by the boy-meets-girl rules of the genre but without toadying to them.
While we’re on the subject of romantic comedies, thank goodness also that Russell didn’t cast someone like Katherine Heigl here. Instead he’s gone with Lawrence, who is past shaping up to be one of the best actresses of her generation – she’s already there. Lawrence is in that rare position of someone who does great genre work (see also X-Men: First Class and The Hunger Games) while knocking it out of the park with heavier stuff like this and Winter’s Bone (though the latter wasn’t really my bag). Indeed, Silver Linings Playbook is not a perfect movie; the film stumbles between whether Pat’s devotion to his wife is endearing or delusional. As such, the movie really takes off once Tiffany enters the picture; Lawrence imbues this potentially confusing character with an honest and unapologetic realism. Where we’re not sure what to make of Pat, Tiffany isn’t transparent so much as she’s accessible and relatable; Lawrence is such a deft craftswoman that the character’s steely exterior doesn’t obscure the truth of her character.
The other cast members are quite good; Cooper is solid as ever, and Chris Tucker pops in to help you forget about the lackluster Rush Hour trilogy with an engaging supporting role as Pat’s confidant. But the real surprise in the cast is that De Niro, after a long stint of roles alternating between uninspiring (Limitless and all those Fockers) and scenery-gobbling (Stardust and Machete), reminds us why he’s a great actor. As Pat’s father, who’s sifting through his own issues while stepping on eggshells around his son, De Niro enters the pantheon of “movie dads you wouldn’t object to having.” He never quite acts out of his own ethos, since you’ll always be thinking of him as De Niro first and Dad second, but he’s able to handle the extremes of his character with aplomb. When he begins to weep over his son’s condition, it’s difficult not to be moved with him, but when he makes a key decision about betting on the dance competition he’s back to the same stammering repetition that elicited so many grins in Goodfellas.
All told, I’m still a bit surprised that Silver Linings Playbook got as much Oscar love as it did. It’s not that the film is bad by any stretch of the imagination; no, once it gets going it’s quite enjoyable. But it seems so far removed from the stalwart significance of the rest of the crop, like Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty. But perhaps if the film restores our confidence in the romantic comedy genre it also reminds us that sometimes the Oscars get it right; there’s enough good work being done here that I would have been complaining – especially had Jennifer Lawrence not taken home that trophy.
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