Russell: Silver Linings Playbook (2013)

Based on Matthew Quick's bestselling novel, Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Pat (Bradley Cooper), an ex-teacher who returns to his home town after being discharged from a psychiatric institution. Released to the care of his parents Pat Sr. (Robert de Niro) and Dolores (Jacki Weaver), Pat sets out to reconnect with his ex-wife Nicki – it was her infidelity that prompted his nervous breakdown - but finds himself distracted by Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a distant acquaintance with a similarly troubled history. All the material is there for a feel-good film, but this is more of a feel-better film, partly because Pat's genuinely bipolar, rather than merely eccentric, or eccentrically troubled, as so often occurs in films of this kind. And David O. Russell very much reflects that in his direction, making for a film that’s quite true to the book’s slightly unbalanced, first-person voice – his trademark jerky, jagged editing makes it feel as if Pat’s continually running away from himself, while the circuitous, vertiginous pans make everything feel a little too close, on the verge of jump-cutting in, as if the camera were tracing out the ambit of Pat’s multiple restraining orders, an ambit he’s continually, manically trying to restrain himself from crossing one last time. Football plays a big part in the film – Pat Sr. is a manic Eagles fan – so it makes sense that Pat’s movements quickly come to feel like a football match gone awry; he moves as if he’s continually bracing himself for a tackle, while every confrontation, however minor, is poised at that tensile cusp just before a tackle becomes a fight, bodies clenched with the breathless anticipation of a fan so obsessive and devoted that he’s working even harder than the players he’s watching. And though Pat’s romance with Tiffany involves learning to discipline his body through a dance competition they decide to enter together – the film actually builds towards a football-dance parlay – the process is never complete, can never quite stave off the digital darkness that’s always lurking at the fringes of the action. Sometimes, certainly, it’s a warm darkness, the hushed hearth of an evening football game, but it’s also a perpetual reminder that these characters have only just started to take the first, tentative steps out of mental illness – and it’s the very modesty of their achievement that makes it feel so profound, preventing the film ever devolving into the series of self-help mantras it could so easily have been.