Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012)

[kingofthejungle]

Silver Linings Playbook was my favorite major release film of 2012-- but as a die-hard auteurist, narrative structure has never really mattered much to me one way or the other.

I think domino is right though, genre films aren't the place to seek structural originality. The genre template invites the artist to reformulate the familiar into the personal, and the ability to play on the audience's expectations and familiarity with the form is a powerful toolkit to wield. The comparison to these other films brings out subtle differences that can be powerfully resonant.

One of the reasons I love the film is that it brings to mind masterpieces of an earlier era, like Capra's It Happened One Night and Hawks' His Girl Friday. The story is the same; you begin with matched opposing polarities, and watch as the attraction between them removes the obstacles that keep them apart. But this time we aren't watching the heiress and working Joe of the New Deal era, or the wisecracking newspaper populists of the pre-war era, but two neurotics of the present. It is precisely the similarity to these other films that allows Silver Linings Playbook to function as a social critique. Russell questions the self-consciousness of the era that produces such neuroses; in the society he shows us, everyone seems to be teetering on the brink of mental illness. For all of the stigma associated with the conditions of Lawrence and Cooper's characters, they aren't that different from anyone else - only more honest about it.

The film's tone is fascinating, too. Equal parts comedy and tragedy, it seems to suggest that the line that separates happiness from futility, love from abandon, is deliriously thin. Despite the fact that we know where the film is headed, one can easily imagine these characters spiraling out of control at any second (and they frequently do). The happy ending the film arrives at is well earned, and becomes as much an affirmation of human adaptability as the ending of a love story.

[colinr0380]

Watching this was a really weird experience. I went from kind of hating the manipulations of the film and its approach to 'mental illness' in the first half, feeling that it was too easily contriving to push easy dramatic buttons and quirky affectations, to kind of loving the second half in which the abrasive tone calms, the relationships come to the fore and eventually the whole film becomes a more honestly slick romantic drama film with some usual third act dramatic complications more than a 'mental illness issues' one.

I think the aspect that I most responded to in the film was the implicit idea that everyone around Bradley Cooper's character Pat (and this might just be a consequence of events being tied very much to his character's perspective) appears to be using and bullying him, watching him warily (the neighbours), treating his fears and questions brusquely or unsympathetically (the psychiatrist in particular), threatening or teasing him, and always right on the scene ready to threaten or punish as soon as possible (the police in particular). Even the initial steps of 'romance' with Jennifer Lawrence's character Tiffany seem to be the result of the couple being forced together because the other characters don't know how to deal with them and apparently seems to believe that two angry and upset (for different reasons) people should naturally be forced together because they share the same...mental illnesses... and therefore make for a...perfect match?

This was the main aspect that really annoyed me with the first section of the film, as all of these subtly patronising and rather rude people seem to be manipulating Pat and pushing him around into situations that only exacerbate his tensions. There is no sensitivity there, just people demanding apologies, testing out 'trigger' songs to see how Pat reacts, and seemingly trying to replace a lost wife with a distracting casual sex partner which is something that feels demeaning to both Pat and Tiffany. When this is combined with Pat's too obviously 'quirky' behaviour of throwing books through windows and taking runs while dressed in garbage bags I felt really uncomfortable with the film, and it seemed to be heading in a direction of the surrounding society being implied to be correct and proper in their behaviours towards Pat.

Yet the second half of the film turned me around quite a lot. The mental illness angle gets quite nicely backgrounded and the romance and the dual (duelling) subplots of the dance contest and the football betting get to (beautifully) shoulder the burden of contrivances instead (I guess that I just currently prefer emotional truth in a contrived situation to contrived emotions in a 'truthful' situation!). I also really like that all the aspects that rubbed me the wrong way about the characters in the film in the first half get beautifully dealt with whilst staying almost entirely the same in the second! I like that the film instead of showing Pat 'changing his behaviour' instead shows (as kingofthejungle also notes above) that everyone around him is angry, upset and frustrated with their lives - is as 'mentally ill' and, yes, as screwed up as he is. The only difference is that everyone else isn't being forced to take medication or being watched like a hawk for the moment that they'll 'go crazy'.

I think it could be argued that perhaps this is because we are seeing the world through Pat's eyes and his relationship with the world is being 'cognitively modified', or whatever the buzzword is these days, but the film also keeps showing that Pat is still being pushed around and manipulated even here, which makes that excellent scene involving making the bet so good. That scene begins following the big conflict in the football game in which Pat gets into a fight ends with him coming home and confronting his father, who goes ballistic. Yet Pat is surrounded by his older brother, friend and even the psychiatrist this time. He's part of the community with people standing up for him, rather than everyone attacking him (and I like the implication from this that there are some forms of violence, such as brawling over racial taunts at a football match, or trying to protect a relative, that are somehow 'allowed' and 'acceptable'. The film sets up a contrived situation here, but it feels as if the contrivance works to juxtapose the 'acceptable' punch up against say the more disturbing verbal fight scene outside the movie theatre earlier on, and implicitly ask why say sports violence isn't seen as a symptom of mental illness but more as a form of letting off some competitive steam). Yet once Tiffany comes in and takes control of the situation from the father, Pat is immediately sidelined again for the majority of the scene. Then when both Tiffany and his father (and I really think that both Jennifer Lawrence and Robert DeNiro have the key characters here: Tiffany aggressive and Pat Snr is passive in the way that they are asking things of Pat) start making plans that involve Pat doing stuff for them again that leads to his significant refusal to do it. What won me over to the film at that point was that the film allows the 'sympathetic' characters to manipulate and in some senses bully Pat into the dance contest bet. He's still being pushed around as much as when the guy having sex with his wife in the shower, driving Pat's mental problems to a head at the beginning of the film, told him that "you should leave". Only he's being pushed around in service of a happy rom-com, Strictly Ballroom-esque, ending!

I found it very amusing that both the dance contest and the sports betting stuff become quintessential McGuffins in the final act: they're crucially important for the characters but the audience doesn't really need to care too much about the minutiae and instead enjoy the dynamics of the interplay between the characters, particularly in the scene in which the bet gets made.

Spoiler

I also like the way that in some ways Pat ends up turning the tables on the other characters at the end of the film, exposing their fears of what he'll do when he suddenly confronts his wife face-to-face again, only to discover that he's not just been living inside a rock solid delusion about the marriage continuing but has seemingly been preparing for that moment for a while, and this is something that Tiffany helped him with. He's been given a more secure mental space through the interactions with Tiffany, but in the end his own stability had to come from within himself and couldn't (shouldn't) be imposed on him from without, even by those with the best of intentions for him.

I particularly like that we get Pat running Tiffany down after that scene, which is a beautiful re-staging of the earlier scene in which Tiffany was hounding Pat - finally he is confidently able to go after Tiffany now that he's dealt with all of the assumptions and baggage of his previous relationship, and crucially he has chosen to approach Tiffany rather than having her imposed on him from the outside as some sort of 'consolation prize' or distraction by others, or way to rekindle his relationship with his wife by proxy (which Tiffany herself seemed just to be tragically accepting as her 'role' for the majority of the film, despite Jennifer Lawrence's feisty playing of the character).

It really feels like a film about a man learning to let go of a toxic past relationship, to accept his part in it but not the entire responsibility for its failure, and also to forge new mutually respectful relationships with those remaining, rather than either railing entirely against them or allowing himself to be entirely passive in the face of others.

It is strange as I get the impression that the general consensus was that most people like the wacky antics first part (it was certainly the section that used to get all the clips during award season) and then got disappointed by the film reverting to a conventional type in the latter stages. I'm not entirely sure if I would give the film credit for 'brilliantly subverting itself' in its final sections to do something such as emphasise the power and relevance of Hollywood structure and screenwriting to bring characters and audiences closer to issues. I think that instead the film did end up retreating into tried and tested tropes (there is also something to be said for this being the kind of film where it is essential to have two 'beautiful actors' in the main roles, as the entire tone of the film would be off if it tried to play this with unknown or average Joe actors. Even the characters keep bringing up how good Bradley Cooper looks since he 'got out of the hospital', as if Pat has really gone through the key 'better person' change (into a good looking movie star all of whose faults will be forgiven in the end) before the film even started!). But it dealt with the tried and tested stuff much better than the earlier abrasive material and in some ways got lucky that the turn made the film more emotionally moving rather than less!

[therewillbeblus]

Being developed as a Broadway musical