It takes a pretty terrible movie to make a magnificent theater like the Paramount feel like a prison, and David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook accomplished just that when it played at the Virginia Film Festival Saturday. Surrounded by hordes of cackling viewers, I knew from the film’s first frame that there would be no escape from the dull, lumbering story that writer-director Russell had cooked up in an obvious attempt to strike Oscar gold after failing two years ago with the similarly mediocre The Fighter.
Like that 2010 hack job, Silver Linings Playbook tells the tale of a simplistically drawn and cliché-ridden protagonist who seeks to piece his life together and to strike a balance between familial pressures, professional fulfillment and, of course, romance. Here, the leading man is Pat Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper), an ex-teacher plagued by anger issues, an estranged wife, a competitive older brother and a sports-obsessed father. And as if these factors weren’t clichéd enough, Pat has recently spent time at a mental institution and is still trying to convince himself that he’s not crazy as he strives to see the “silver lining” — get it? — in every situation.
For much of the movie’s excessive runtime, we have the unfortunate privilege of seeing this thoroughly unlikable and obnoxious character engage in predictably irritating antics. One particularly quirky sequence has him laying waste to a magazine rack at his therapist’s office, and another heinous scene has him accosting a high school teacher and dramatically pumping her for information. If none of this sounds funny, it’s because it’s not. Pat’s character tends to come across as a mix between Adam Sandler’s annoying role in Anger Management and a piece of lifeless cardboard — as you might expect, the result isn’t pretty.
But a movie this pretentious could never settle to be merely a cringe-inducing Anger Management rip-off, so Russell introduces a subplot involving Pat’s father (Robert DeNiro) and his bookmaking gig, along with a conventional oddball-meets-oddball love story featuring the lovely Jennifer Lawrence. DeNiro’s role is reduced to the status of broad caricature, and his attempts to become closer to his son through gambling on Philadelphia Eagles games induce more eye rolls than smiles or tears, but Lawrence almost redeems the film with her turn as Tiffany, a wild-child widow who enlists Pat to enter a dancing contest with her in return for helping him to regain contact with his wife.
Sadly, even Lawrence’s charming presence and sympathetic portrayal can’t hope to make up for the rest of the movie, which vacillates between silly sentimentality and coarse humor without any apparent consistency or narrative flow. Silver Linings Playbook relies heavily upon its audience’s desire to watch people yell at each other in vulgar and uninventive ways, and frankly, I’ve seen enough of that activity in the presidential debates and advertisement back-and-forths to last me more than a lifetime.
Here, the conversations are supposed to make us think seriously about mental illness, romantic compatibility, misguided pursuits, obsessions, the value and measure of victory and familial cohesion, but the film treats these issues in such shallow and overdone ways that we, as the audience, ultimately gain nothing. To make matters worse, the movie’s camera work amounts to jerky and seemingly meaningless shifts in angle and focus that prove more distracting than enlightening.
Both the cinematography and Danny Elfman’s monotonous musical score seem aimed at achieving a sort of stereotypically “indie” aesthetic, but indie for indie’s sake just isn’t all that interesting, especially considering the polish and potential Russell demonstrated 18 years ago with the low-budget Flirting with Disaster.
Apart from Lawrence’s thrilling performance, everything about Silver Linings Playbook seems sloppy and ill conceived. Brilliant actresses such as Animal Kingdom’s Jacki Weaver, who plays Pat’s mother, are pushed to the sidelines, whereas bland and inconstant actors such as Cooper and Chris Tucker — who portrays a jaw-dropping stereotype of a mentally unstable man — are given the spotlight and allowed to sink an already nasty script even further into the muck. Unless someone chains you down and forces you to suffer through this mess of a movie, you’d do best to run for the hills when it comes to a theater near you.
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