White-Knuckling It
“Yeah about a week before the incident I called the cops and I told them
that my wife and the history guy were plotting against me by embezzling money
from the local high school which… wasn’t true. It was a delusion. And we later
found out from the hospital that it’s because I’m uh….undiagnosed bipolar.”
- Pat
It turns out that Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, had been white-knuckling
his mental disorder for most of his life without the proper help. Then one day he
walked in on his wife with another man, snapped, and nearly beat the other guy
to death. He was arrested. The court ordered him to spend eight months in a
psychiatric institute. As the movie starts just about as he is to leave the
hospital. How do you know that he still might have a problem? Well, he is in
his late 30s. He has lost his wife, his job, most of his friends, and his home and
is moving back in with his parents. The kicker though is that he is very
optimistic about his chances of getting all of it back especially his wife even
though she sought and received a restraining order against him. His plan involves
not taking his medication, getting in shape by running around the neighborhood
while wearing a garbage bag (for the sweat you see), and reading his ex-wife’s
summer reading list for the high school English class she is teaching. His
parents, played by Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver worriedly try to impose some
sort of reality on him to no avail. Until that is he has a couple of rage
induced episodes at 4am in the morning brought upon such trivial matters as not
being able to find his wedding video and a not-so-happy ending to
Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms”
that end up waking up the entire street and getting the police invited over to
the house. And at that point after the subsequent mood swing and humiliation
set in, he finally and sadly realizes that he simply cannot white-knuckle it
anymore. He still needs help.
The director of Silver Linings Playbook is David O. Russell, a filmmaker
who is the preeminent authority in cinema on eccentric slightly crazy families.
Other must-see movies he has made about these types of people are “Flirting
with Disaster” starring Ben Stiller and “The Fighter” starring Mark Wahlberg
and Christian Bale. There is such a degree of authenticity to these off-kilter
movies that it would not surprise me a bit if David O. Russell came from an
extremely dysfunctional family himself. He has had huge blowups and arguments
on the sets of his movies before (George Clooney won’t ever work with him again
after “Three Kings” and there is a video on YouTube that involves him getting supremely
pissed off at Lily Tomlin on the set of “I Heart Huckabees”) and has freely
admitted that one of the reasons he was inspired to make “Silver Linings
Playbook” was his own son’s issues with depression. Like the father and son in
this movie, I think that it is likely the Russells have mental illness in their
genes. But let me be clear: whatever ‘crazy’ David O. Russell does have in him,
it is definitely the kind that borders with brilliance.
Great directors tend to have signature styles. Some are so strong that
it becomes easy to spot their stories with or without knowing beforehand who
directed it. You can’t really mistake an Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick
movie with any other director’s movie. Contemporary moviegoers should also be
able to pick out the latest Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, or Quentin Tarantino
movie without much help. David O. Russell too has a very recognizable style but
it is itself a very unique unique style. Whereas most of the time a great
director’s films are characterized by clarity of vision or a certainty in which
types of camera movements and angles they use, Russell’s style is impenetrably
chaotic. There is a kinetic shakiness and unpredictability to the camera
movements that lend his movies a disconcerting rhythm. He is doing something
behind the camera that I do not understand. And yet it still works and given
the subject matter is perhaps the best way to tell a story.
And he is an amazing writer too. His movies are always insightful,
original, and funny. One of the ways you can tell a movie has very good writing
is when awards season comes along and most of the cast is nominated for awards.
And right now Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro (playing Pat Senior), and Jennifer
Lawrence (playing Tiffany, a recently widowed and equally damaged love
interest) are being considered for all kinds of awards. My favorite scenes
include the pharmaceutical shoptalk between Pat and Tiffany at a dinner party
about what kind of drugs they have taken, Pat Sr.’s OCD obsession with the Philadelphia
Eagles, and the ballroom dancing contest. Yes, there is also some really not
that bad dancing in this movie. The writing can be said to be so good that it
got Chris Tucker out of retirement. You might remember him. His last movie was
a lead role opposite Jackie Chan in “Rush Hour 3.” That was in 2007. His last
movie before then was 2001’s “Rush Hour 2.” So basically he has been retired
for ten years. Chris is one of those rare cases where a movie star quits after
starting to pull in $20 million a movie in salary. He just did not want to act
anymore. But, inexplicably, here he is as Danny, a friend of Bradley’s from the
mental institution. He pops into the movie a couple of times after illegally
breaking out of the asylum.
I would say the only real problem with this movie is the casting of
Jennifer Lawrence. She does not do a terrible job but I bet somebody else could
have done it better. The character calls for an emotionless deadpan performance
sure, but there are emotionless deadpan performances and then there are
emotional deadpan performances that nonetheless convey every single emotion the
person is feeling anyway. Go ahead and rent an Aubrey Plaza movie, either
“Safety Not Guaranteed” or the TV show “Parks and Recreation” and you will see
what I mean. Jennifer Lawrence may just get a nomination for this movie, but I
figure that has less to do with her talent and more to do with the fact Tiffany
is an extremely well written role combined with the fact that the supporting
actress category always has notoriously few well-written roles, this year being
no exception. Any competent actress probably would have had a chance to be
nominated.
Oh and this movie has a much better ending than “Farewell to Arms.”
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