Silver Linings Playbook [Review by Haus]

What can you do with two hours? How much life do you live? Really? And don’t cherry-pick the two hours you went skydiving, or that oh-so-brief span when you snapped every “adventure” pic on your profile. Nope, standard day. What do you do? Pop quiz, hotshot.

Well, I don’t know what you do, but around here the average two hours doesn’t buy too much. It gets me from “good morning” halfway to lunch. Same old. Two hours is up: You’re still at the same desk, doing the same stuff with the same people as before.

Or you can see a movie. Spend time with new, imaginary, and beautiful characters! People whose problems seem insurmountable, right up until they’re not! With popcorn. You’ll get the highlights of life, the best lines, the aw-shucks moments, and none of the chaff. Stories are great, films are great.

So see one. See this one, in fact, because it has all those things. It’s first-rate escapism with just enough serious subject matter and cheeky literary allusions that you can take a date and not feel lowbrow. It’s a three-act crowd-pleaser all dressed up in indie.

This truly is a very enjoyable film. I owe you a basic synopsis, and it goes like this: Bradley Cooper gets out of the looney bin (he’s only a bit bipolar, don’t worry) and tries to get his old wife back. (Yes, wife.) Along the way he meets a couple times with his therapist (Anupam Kher, who’s perfect), commiserates with his pal (John Ortiz — omg it’s Jose Yero!), navigates his father‘s superstitions and OCD sports obsession (omg more mental illness!), and also meets Jennifer Lawrence (omg omg mockingjay omg!) who wants him to dance in a contest.

It’s a fun film. The acting is strong, hearts are warmed, and the really cringeworthy “mental illness” moments tail off to a happy and necessary minimum some time in act two.

At its core, this is a story about people leveraging social relationships to get what they want, and using others to satisfy their own offbeat urges. It’s a bit fetishistic in that sense (captured beautifully by a suddenly-lecherous Cooper in a diner scene), but it’s all blunted a bit. (Makes sense: Squeezing a feel-good tale from pure self-seeking scheming is a tall order.)

Cooper and Lawrence have great chemistry, if trading unfiltered and hamfisted verbal bludgeon-blows counts as chemistry. (It does.) And David O. Russell (who can do no wrong given Naomi Watts‘s post-breakdown commercial in I Heart Huckabees) does no wrong here, keeping both leads just sweet enough that we root for them. (I was hoping for a little more Melvin Udall, but alas.) And Lawrence is really terrific here. She put a little Winter’s Bone back in her Katniss. You know, that does sound even worse out loud.

If I have a problem with this movie — and I’m really not sure I do — it’s that it walks and talks like serious, mature-subject-matter Oscar-bait, but in the end it’s a pat and prim gee-whiz zany rom-com. If these people really were all so sick in the head, they’d burn bridges like mad, those wrong things they say would actually stick, and they’d alienate everyone they know. But all’s well that ends well, which I guess I should have expected from a film with silver lining in the title whose protagonist openly berates Hemingway for denying him a happy ending. Fair enough. I’m just not sure it’s as clever as it thinks it is.

But so what? Films are escapism, and you’ll surely escape here. Silver Linings Playbook is a short stack of wholesome all piled high with quirk, and drizzled with so much authenticity (sweatpants! middle class houses! stubble! bad makeup!) you’ll swear these are real people. They’re anything but, but that’s not the point. Enjoy the ride.

HAUS VERDICT: Dances with the dark stuff, just a little, then loads up with wholesome and empties a clip in your face. Great film, though. You’ll see what I mean.