Review
Silver Linings Playbook
Movie Review
Director | David O. Russell | |
Starring | Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker | |
Release | 21 NOV (US) 21 NOV (UK) |
Ed Williamson
21st November 2012
I have no idea what 'playbook' means, being British. How am I possibly supposed to grasp a concept so arcane; so steeped in Americana? You might as well ask me to participate in a rodeo or wage a baseless imperialist war against a country wholly unprepared to defend itself against mine. A good thing, then, that the UK marketers of Silver Linings Playbook had the sense to make the word very small in all its promotional material. A less good thing that Ali wrote a whole feature about this before I got around to writing the introduction I'd been planning based on this premise. One day I'll have more than one idea in my head at a time, then I'll be unstoppable.

But the first thing you notice, and what immediately puts you on safe ground, is how funny Silver Linings Playbook is, and how much this is effected by Cooper's performance, as opposed to a script packed full of zingers. Just released from an institution after a breakdown, his Pat Solitano is jittery, seemingly bipolar and largely oblivious to social boundaries. This sort of 'missing moral barometer' idea would be easy enough to play just for laughs – as Zach Galifianakis does alongside him in The Hangover, say – but Cooper has the deftness to be both funny and convincingly crazy. He can switch from strung-out staccato comic delivery to real ranting and raving emotion in no time at all, wrong-footing you but never the story.
Moving back in with his parents (a football-obsessed De Niro and an underused Jacki Weaver), Pat sets about obsessively trying to win back the wife who cheated on him and set off his episode. It's a doomed endeavour, you can see, but he's so engrossed in it that when he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), recently widowed and with her own mental health problems, he's unable to react normally to his attraction to her, and the prospect of a traditional love story (suggested a bit too glibly by the trailer) seems remote.
Where there's a danger that the standard getting-to-know-you tropes of romantic comedy are going to rear up, it's dashed: the usual idea of the man overcoming his commitment anxiety is replaced by his genuine disinterest in the woman. It's probably too much to suggest that this mirrors the disjointed thinking of the mentally ill as it's probably intended to, particularly as the film never really addresses those issues head-on, but you could call it 'off-beat', if the term didn't remind you so much of a million Paul Giamatti films with slanty letters on the poster.

There are some missteps towards the finish line: we career a little too readily towards one of those About a Boy endings where the attempt to win a competition substitutes for resolution, trying to wrap up Pat's girl troubles and daddy issues all in one go. It's a little disappointing, given that you don't necessarily want a story to suggest that all its mentally ill characters' problems can be easily resolved. But this is more a nod towards traditional romantic comedy, and fair enough: not everything has to strive to defy categorisation.
Silver Linings Playbook rests entirely on Bradley Cooper's shoulders, in the end, and he carries it with a skill that surprised me. It's probably too comedic a role for the Academy to line him up to lose to Daniel Day-Lewis in February, but he's got chops I never saw in The A-Team. Then again, the cage-fighter guy who played B.A. has probably got chops I never saw in The A-Team.

Support Us

Follow Us
Recent Highlights
-
Review: Jackass Forever is a healing balm for our bee-stung ballsack world
Movie Review
-
Review: Black Widow adds shades of grey to the most interesting Avenger
Movie Review
-
Review: Fast & Furious 9 is a bloodless blockbuster Scalextric
Movie Review
-
Review: Wonder Woman 1984 is here to remind you about idiot nonsense cinema
Movie Review
-
Review: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm arrives on time, but is it too little, or too much?
Movie Review
Advertisement
And The Rest
-
Review: The Creator is high-end, low-tech sci-fi with middling ambitions
Movie Review
-
Review: The Devil All The Time explores the root of good ol' American evil
Movie Review
-
Review: I'm Thinking Of Ending Things is Kaufman at his most alienating
Movie Review
-
Review: The Babysitter: Killer Queen is a sequel that's stuck in the past
Movie Review
-
Review: The Peanut Butter Falcon is more than a silly nammm peanut butter
Movie Review
-
Face The Music: The Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey soundtrack is most outstanding
Movie Feature
-
Review: Tenet once again shows that Christopher Nolan is ahead of his time
Movie Review
-
Review: Project Power hits the right beats but offers nothing new
Movie Review
-
Marvel's Cine-CHAT-ic Universe: Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Movie Feature
-
Review: Host is a techno-horror that dials up the scares
Movie Review