A Mental Breakdown With Many 'Silver Linings'
If David O. Russell pulls anything off in Silver Linings Playbook — an almost-comedy about a bipolar high-school teacher who goes off the deep end and isn't sure how to climb back — it's this: He refuses to make mental illness adorable.
When Bradley Cooper's Pat, recently sprung from eight months in a mental hospital, walks into his doctor's office and hears the strains of the song that accompanied his breakdown — it happens to be Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour" — his impossibly blue eyes seem to spiral into tiny pin dots, like those of a tortured bull. He barks at the receptionist: "Is that song really playing?" And for a moment, we don't know if we're hearing it for sure, either, or if it's simply an imagined sound that's been filtered through the exhausted coffee grounds of his brain.
Moments like that work beautifully in Silver Linings Playbook; in fact, it's more a movie of moments than a story with anything resembling a narrative drive. (Russell also wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Matthew Quick's novel of the same name.)
As the movie opens, Pat is being sprung from the hospital a little early, thanks to the intercession of his cautiously supportive mother (Jacki Weaver) and seemingly against the better judgment of his less-supportive dad (Robert De Niro).
He's feeling better, or so he thinks, and he's eager to get back to real life, although his hopes for that life are stupendously unrealistic. He believes he can rebuild his marriage, even though his estranged wife has taken out a restraining order against him. (His discovery of her extramarital affair instigated the act of violence that got him put away in the first place.)
Pat can't be swayed from his mission to get his wife back, not even when he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), the tough-cookie sister-in-law of one of his closest friends. (In a stroke of cockeyed genius, Russell has cast Julia Stiles and Lawrence as siblings, and with their moon-shaped faces and alert, inquisitive eyes, they're like a pair of take-no-prisoners cherubim.)
Enlarge The Weinstein Co.
After spending time in a institution, Pat moves in with his parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro) while he tries to repair his relationship with his wife.