The Philadelphia Story

Silver Linings Playbook

*** out of ****

Directed by: David O. Russell

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver and Chris Tucker

Running time: 122 minutes

A blend of indie melodrama and screwball comedy that is full of pitch-perfect performances, the latest film from director David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook, is also the finest achievement of his career.

A filmmaker lambasted for maddening outbursts to the actors he works with – among them, his Three Kings star George Clooney and I Heart Huckabees actress Lily Tomlin – this is the closest the writer/director has gotten to addressing those wounds. It also hits close to home for Russell, whose own son is bipolar and suffers from OCD.

As Pat Solitano, a Philadelphian with undiagnosed bipolar, Bradley Cooper delivers a career-best performance, full of power and pathos. Pat is discharged from a psychiatric facility after an eight-month stay and returns home to find his graduation portrait off the wall, his superstitious father (Robert De Niro, in a return to form) unemployed and his wife nowhere in sight.

Pat snapped when he found his wife, Nikki (Brea Bee), in the shower with another man and then beat him senseless. Now, there is a restraining order out against Pat to stay away from her, an itch that he keeps scratching.

After reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and chucking it out his window, Pat moans about the lack of happy endings to his parents: clearly the character wants one for himself. Pat tries to focus on other matters, with a new motto to live by: “Excelsior,” meaning ‘ever upward’ in Latin.

He goes for runs to get into shape on his quest to reach a silver lining, and is often joined by Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), another misfit with a damaged past who isn’t all together herself due to her husband’s recent death. With both characters having emotional imbalances clearing sifting to their surface, they resolve to help each other.

In the character’s unpredictable disposition, Cooper is always on a thin line between enthusiasm and rage. The character wants to take responsibility of his life. His mother (a thankless Jacki Weaver) digresses, saying that he should stick to medication. Pat resists and puts the burden of getting better on his own shoulders.

Silver Linings Playbook, with its disgruntled characters and off-kilter romance, is a comedy of misplaced aggression. Characters often say impolite things – Russell’s script is harsh and humourous – and are just as screwy as the tone of the film is screwball. The film has its own bipolar disorder, with unwieldy handheld camerawork and circular passages of dialogue.

Trapped in Pat’s outlook, Russell gleans a brisk performance from his leading man. However, Silver Linings Playbook only visualizes a few moments from Tiffany’s damaged perspective, which turns her more into an object of Pat’s affection than a character with authority.

Nevertheless, Lawrence continues her ascent to superstardom and her frankness is insatiable considering the actor’s best performances have come from darker materials, such as her Oscar-nominated tour de force in Winter’s Bone. The young actress, 22, is wonderful but somewhat wasted, a bit too much of a 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' (although with a firm emphasis on the 'manic' component, given the subject matter).

Silver Linings Playbook glides to a proudly all-American ending, where characters lay two bets – one involving an Eagles game and the other, a ballroom dancing competition – and are forced to overcome their malfunctioning personalities. The last third of the film is a crowd-pleaser, although the seams of this messy love story are stitched together too tidily. The main caveat of Silver Linings Playbook is that it all too easily turns into a film that Pat would adore.