There was a point today when I knew how I was going to start this post, but I lost the idea to a bowl of chili, so instead, I’m going to launch right into a synopsis.
Silver Linings Playbook is a romantic comedy starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, a bi-polar high school teacher with tendencies towards psychosis and violence, and the impossibly hot Jennifer Lawrence plays a slut with an unspecified personality disorder. (Then again, aren’t all personality disorders unspecified? Ba dum dum ching. You’d only get that if you were my brother Stuprendan.)
It opens with Pat in a state mental institution where he has been interred, you later learn, for almost beating a fellow teacher at his school to death. The teacher fucking deserved it, because he was eating out Pat’s wife Nikki’s sweet little vajayjay in the shower, and Pat found them. Maybe Nikki needed her sweet vajayjay eaten out though, you say to yourself as the audience member, because Pat was having paranoid delusions and acting like a complete psychopath.
Anyway, Pat’s mother comes to discharge him from the mental institution, but not before the writers have a chance to establish his friendship with Danny, played by Chris Tucker, who has an obsessive relationship with his hair, and probably is capable of getting so angry that he’d push you in front of a train. Or at least I thought so, given my familiarity with such sorts of people.
Danny, of course, frequently comes back to rile things up in the script, and make for some funny scenes. He’s the fucking comic relief! But first he goes back to the mental institution.
Danny’s character, now that I’m writing this, is kind of the perfect way to sum up the movie, which very much follows a typical romantic comedy format—lovers meet, there’s obstacles in their way, they are separated by outside forces, they come together in the end. Along the way, hilarity ensues. What makes Silver Linings Playbook different from, say, the normal Mindy Kaling or Judd Apatow movie, is that the characters are believable. Rather than being caricatures of types, you feel like they are real people whose personalities you know and have grown to love. Like, for instance, they’re your family.
Danny, in a lesser movie, would be played by like fucking Seann William Scott. He would have been the outlier in his group of bros, but his weirdest thing would be that he slept with like a 40-year-old woman and farted on the bride’s face. The weirdest thing Danny does, on the other hand, is smoke crystal meth, steal cars, and have a compulsion to hold things in both of his hands, making for a scene in which Pat’s father, played by Robert De Niro—who, by the way, is a classic obsessive compulsive—is forced to give over his lucky handkerchief during an Eagles game so that Danny doesn’t lose his mind and burn down the house. The more uncomfortable something is, and the closer it is to danger, the more hilarious it becomes.
This synopsis is making no sense. What I mean to say is that screwball is best played by the insane. So when the actors themselves aren’t insane, their characters must be written as such in order for the movie to flow naturally. The formula only works when the characters are allowed personalities outside of the plotline. Or something like that. I’m getting back to the synopsis now.
So, after Pat returns to the Philadelphia suburb where his family lives, he meets Tiffany, the sister of his best friend’s wife—played, by the way, by the pancake face Julia Stiles. Tiffany’s husband, Tommy, has just died, and she’s looking for comfort by sleeping with everyone she encounters. Pat is way too insane to sleep with someone, and is also obsessed to getting back together with Nikki, his ex-wife, who is terrified of him.
Tiffany starts stalking Pat, even though he says he doesn’t like her. Then she manipulates him into spending time with her by promising to deliver a letter to Nikki. (Pat can’t do it himself because of a restraining order.) In exchange, Pat must enter a dance competition with her.
While they prepare for the dance, they discover their love for each other, etc etc, happily ever after. Plus some Eagles games, plus some therapy sessions, plus an ethnically charged altercation involving Indians (not the native kind) at a tailgate party, plus Robert De Niro acting just like my father. The end.
Becky, if you’re reading this, you will love this movie.
What struck me most about the movie was not so much the movie itself, but what it says about cultural trends at large. For a while, American culture has been about assimilating to the “normal.” Gays getting married, kids being heavily medicated, everyone going to college and getting an office job. Mainstreaming was seen as being healthy. We were willing to do anything—put our kids on a crazily addictive amphetamine known as Adderall, sacrifice our personalities—in order to be “normal.”
But lately, I’ve been noticing trending towards a counter-movement against that. It’s time for one. Thesis and antithesis, or whatever the fuck Hegel says. Rather than people striving towards perfection or following the rules, they’re starting to embrace what makes them extraordinary—the things that other people call insane.
In Silver Linings Playbook, the two characters meet. They fuck up. They miss dates. They call each other whores. They have meltdowns on the streets. They say the wrong things. Still, they end up happily ever after.
If the message catches on it, it will be a big relief for some of my more interesting friends, the ones who have huge, intelligent personalities—labeled and medicated, sometimes, as mental illnesses—but find it hard to meet guys who want to stick around. If we trend towards relationships not having to be perfect, not having to follow a prescribed set of ridiculous rules—men pay, no sleeping on the first day, he has to call you, he better not flake on dinner, you better not freak out and cry, you better act like a normal person—perhaps such girls will find it easier to meet someone who’s right for them. Mainstreaming, ultimately, always backfires, and usually within the first few dates. It’s healthier to realize that even if you don’t play by the rules, you still have a chance for happiness.
Here’s to reading too much into things! And sorry that this is the worst review I’ve ever written.
In any case, Silver Linings Playbook is an enjoyable flick. “Did we laugh too loudly?” Caleb asked me when we left the theater.
“Who cares,” I responded, emboldened by Pat, who much like me, has no filter on his big mouth. And one more thing. Bradley Cooper is fucking hot.
