Your Silver Lining...

To reintroduce myself and to make penance for being such a naughty little reviewer this Summer and Fall: My name is Mr. Unhappy. You may remember me from such blogs as Mission Impossible 4: Weird Nipples and The House may be silent but Elizabeth Olsen tots are loud and clear. How could I possibly be gone for so long without writing and telling you all what movies to see? You guys have depended on me to be the beacon for what is good and decent in this world of cinema.

Well to partially explain, I went to a midnight show in a theater in this small Colorado suburb…but perhaps that joke is a bit too soon?

The truth is this.  Blockbuster season while fantastic as a moviegoer really messes with me as a movie reviewer. No matter what, if I stood from the rooftop and screamed that The Amazing Spider-man was neither amazing nor Spidermanny would you have said “Nah, I heard it wasn’t spidery enough.” So I do regret not reviewing for a while. I meant to get back to it but the damn movies coming out were so lame.  Dredd, A Finding Nemo rerelease, Resident Evil : Retribution, The Bourne Legacy, Pitch Perfect and Piranha 3DD all left me void of any real excitement to write about them but now I am back…as Arnold said in The Expendables 2.  I do understand that I need to do better. So hold me to it. In the meantime I have a silver lining to this whole half year break.... and that silver lining is Jennifer Lawrence.

The Silver Linings Playbook

Can I say how much I love Jennifer Lawrence? I mean this girl can do no wrong in my book. I’m trying to figure out how I could have found an article in which people said she was too fat to play Katniss in The Hunger Games. The girl has some curves. In many circles that is considered sexier than some girl whose ribs you can count whilst banging them. I mean sure it gives you something to focus on and keep the peep from going off too early but when did it become a bad thing to put your hand on someone’s waist and feel something other than a sharp poke of their hip? Feel something when they press against you. Curves are sexy and contrary to popular belief, even in the districts of the Hunger Games, women can be starving and curvy. Yet all this is besides the point. Jennifer Lawrence is more than just a good looking woman, she is a tremendous actress. Smart, funny (at least in the interviews I’ve seen) and instantly someone you want to root for. The last bit is why I write about her here. 

In The Silver Linings Playbook, Jennifer Lawrence plays Tiffany, a widow who lost the love of her life far too early and as a result is a little bit crazy and quite a bit rock and roll. Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solitano, a man who also lost the love of his life after finding his wife was cheating on him in the shower with a history teacher. Sure he (understandably) beat the man so severely they locked him into a mental institution for 8 months but both these people have lost the person who their world revolved around. Tiffany lost her husband in death and Pat lost his in a restraining order.

As it turns out Pat was living undiagnosed with bipolar disorder. As he says in his therapists office, he was basically white knuckling through his life. Now all Pat can do is work on himself, get in shape and become the man his wife would want. He doesn’t see that she was cheating on him or the restraining order, he just sees that he needs to put his life back together and it all begins with his wife Nikki. Tiffany see through all the BS and sees Pat’s craziness for what it is. His desperate struggle to put back in order what so easily fell out of order. 

After being released into his parents care, Pat begins to try to put things back together with varying successes. He reads Nikki’s high school class book list in order to take an interest in her teaching. He runs obsessively to lose weight and become a man Nikki would want. He reunites with his best friend who invites him to dinner with his wife who is also Nikki’s best friend. While at dinner he comes face to face with Lawrence’s Tiffany who is so like him he tries to distance himself. Instantly there is an attraction but Pat cannot be bothered with his feelings, just his goal of getting his silver lining. As it turns out, Tiffany can be a means to an end for him and he agrees to help her by entering a dance competition with her if she will get a letter to Nikki. 

The movie starts with Pat in a mental institution and as we delve deeper into Pat’s family life we see the dysfunction and craziness he’s lived with his entire life. His father, a life long Eagles fan, needs his remote controls in order and his son to sit with him or else the world will end (by which I mean the Eagles will lose.) Pat’s mother enables her husband’s insanity and just tries to make everything normal by ignoring what isn’t normal about her loved ones. Pat’s brother is constantly reminding Pat of his place in the pecking order by telling him how great his life is and how low Pat’s life is. His wife cuckolds him and then blames him for being upset. With all of this going on around him, a sane person might go insane and it is a wonder Pat didn’t snap before he did.

Insanity is a big component of Silver Linings Playbook. In order for Pat to get truly better he needs to confront his own insanity and move past the part in his life that he is stuck in. Pat is someone so consumed with his thought of what his ideal woman is that he fails to see the woman who understands him and his crazy as well or better than he does. When he and Tiffany finally perform their dance routine, you can see the manic frenzied patterns of their minds even as they are perfectly in control of themselves. Their routine is their way of shouting at the world and accepting their own insanity. 

The movie may not be perfect but the acting is. Cooper probably gives his best performance, playing the extremes in his mind with both subtlety and aggression.  Lawrence draws you in with looks and nuances that actresses twice her age do not have and Tiffany is as three dimensional a character as I’ve seen in a while. You want her to break through Pat’s insanity but also want her to fix herself and find her own worth. Robert DeNiro plays Pat’s father as a man who loves his sons and his Eagles equally. The quality of his life depends on how well the men in green play football and he alternates between believing in his son and hating him for ruining the Eagles juju. Chris Tucker makes a return to acting in a surprisingly subtle role as a fellow patient and friend to Pat. Instead of using his Fifth Element or Rush Hour loudness, he uses his natural charm to endear himself to the audience and everyone in Pat’s life. 

Yet I think the most important part for me was watching Pat in his struggle to find himself metaphorically out of a dark tunnel with a single matchstick. Tiffany can shine her light from the end of the tunnel but Pat needs to look towards her to see it. Instead he wallows in his past with Nikki. It was a deeply personal thought to have as I’ve been stuck. When you just don’t see that there is a way out and away from someone who is toxic for you. I don’t know that the love you have for the first person ever goes away but you need to struggle and fight and dance your way out of the situation to be able to look back on it and understand completely what you want. As Norman Bates said in Psycho “We all go a little mad sometimes.” More important is to tell yourself that it is okay to do it.

Mr. Unhappy sez: See this movie. It is right for so many reasons and wrong for so many right reasons.

How can you not love her?