Showing posts with label Brad Cooper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brad Cooper. Show all posts

Friday, March 22, 2013

Silver Linings Playbook

CAST: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Rober de Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, Anupam Kher  DIRECTOR: David O Russell  SCREENWRITER:  David O. Russell  PRODUCER: Bruce Cohen, Donna Gigliotti  EDITOR: Jay Cassidy, Crispin Stuthers   MUSICAL DIRECTOR:  Danny Elfman  GENRE:  Romantic Comedy-Drama  CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Masanobu Takayanagi  RUNNING TIME:  122 minutes  DISTRIBUTOR:  Weinstein Company  LOCATION:  United States

Technical assessment:   4
Moral Assessment:   3
CINEMA rating:   V 14
MTRCB rating:  R 13
Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is released from a Baltimore psychiatric hospital on the insistence of his mother Dolores (Jacki Weaver) who does not like him getting used to the hospital’s routine life.  He was committed by court order to the mental hospital after he beat up a man he had caught in the shower with his wife Nikki (Brea Bee), a teacher at a local high school.  Pat moves in with his parents, to the delight of his father Pat Sr. (Robert de Niro) who takes it as an opportunity to bond with his son.  Stubbornly refusing medication, Pat resolves to rebuild himself by getting in tip top physical shape and enriching his mind by reading all the books Nikki assigns to her students.  He is determined to win her back despite a retraining order barring him from coming within 500 feet of Nikki.  Pat soon meets another psychiatric case, young widow Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), who volunteers to deliver Pat’s letters to Nikki if Pat would be her partner in a local dance contest.
Two things make a major push for Silver Linings Playbook: the story and the actors.  All else are there in support of these two.  The story is part factual, part fantasy, but is told in a way that makes the film bitingly real.  The story needs no eye candy, no CGI, just the flesh and blood realism of a middleclass neighborhood in Philadelphia, acted out like the actors were born and raised in that milieu and were in fact telling their true story.  Brad Cooper is a revelation here, playing a character so remote from his usual roles and giving it incredible depth.  Jennifer Lawrence—well, the Oscar speaks of the promise the 22-year old holds as a major talent.  (Somehow her face is perfect for the intense characters she’s given, remember Hunger Games).  Here her character is so fierce she can steal the thunder from de Niro, who, by the way, delivers classic de Niro as Pat Sr. 
Silver Linings Playbook gives hope, as the proverbial silver lining behind the dark clouds.  It’s an optimistic movie that treats mental illness with  respect, and demonstrates how persons with neuroses may rise above their situation.  The keyword is “Excelsior” (Latin for “ever upward”) which subtly permeates the day to day life of ordinary people in an ordinary neighborhood.  Not overtly religious, the characters nonetheless hope and believe—Pat himself, a bi-polar patient, says “There is a reason for everything that  happens.”   The Solitano home offers clues to the inhabitants’ Christian faith but the father engages in rituals—something like a home-brewed feng shui—that’s supposed to bring him luck at betting on the Philadelphia Eagles.  In the end, one may indeed wonder how relevant medicine is when people who sincerely work for what they want, do not get what they want, but get something better instead.  Then you realize, the silver lining is but a proof of the presence behind the clouds of a light-giving, life-giving Sun.