SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

Silver Linings Playbook is all set up to win a bunch of oscars for brutally and honestly portraying what life is like for adults with mental health issues.  And then maybe it will win a nobel peace prize for inventing a more efficient bio-diesel, or be crowned prom king, since we’re already giving it awards that make no sense.  This movie isn’t about what it’s like to have mental health problems.  This movie is about what having mental health problems looks like to an overdramatic prick.

 

As a disclaimer, I am not bipolar.  I am barely even monopolar.  My dislike of this film isn’t a personal thing.  I’m sure watching Silver Linings Playbook would be especially annoying to someone who suffers from one of the afflictions its characters claim to portray, but we’ll focus in a more general sense on how annoying this movie is for anyone who likes things to be good or make sense.  The ‘fucked up’ characters in Silver Linings are fucked up in the same way most gay characters are gay.  There is so much effort put into showing how different and strange they are that there isn’t any room left to show that they’re also real people.

And that’s the entire movie.  If Bradley Cooper or Jennifer Lawrence were just the wacky friends of the real person we’re supposed to actually relate to, it would be semi-offensive but tolerable.  Instead, they’re the central focus of the film and because David O. Russell is intent on being the biggest, bitchiest drama-monger ever, he gives all the supporting characters the exact same treatment.  It’s like watching an all-Mr Yunioshi Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Unlike Breakfast at Tiffany’s it doesn’t come from a place of hatred, but the fact is that Silver Linings Playbook is a collection of stereotypes.  And that those characters are thrown into an even more stereotypical, nonsensical plot.  I’m trying to harp less on plot.  It turns out it’s just one of those things I put way too much focus on.  Sometimes good movies sacrifice a little plot to mood or characters or training montages and if they do those things well, I’ll give them a pass from now on.  But Silver Linings Playbook sacrificed its plot to none of those things.  It sacrificed its plot to David O. Russell’s wannabe quirky bullshit.  If you already have the benefit of a published novel and a co-writer and multiple drafts and of you not being the worst, there is absolute no reason for the climax of your movie to take place ‘at the big dance competition’.  And if the climax of your movie does take place at a dancing competition, please do me a favor and just go fuck yourself so hard.

 

Silver Linings Playbook is an incompetent film.  David O. Russell is not an incompetent director but man…he really fucked this one up.  He fucked it up in a way that makes me want to watch the rest of his movies again, just to see if maybe I missed how bad they actually were.  And now he’s being rewarded for it.  So thanks, Oscars, for being especially terrible this year.  I look forward to seeing Russell’s next film about bulimia, in which Jennifer Garner just vomits for two hours straight while Luke Wilson holds her hair and also vomits.  BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT’S LIKE FOR THOSE PEOPLE. – DT