My Cherie Amour Fou

Lawrence and Cooper are out-patient and in love in Silver Linings Playbook.

««1/2  Silver Linings Playbook. Written by David O. Russell, based on a novel by Matthew Quick. Directed by David O. Russell.  

Many people still don’t think of mental illness as “real” illness. Want proof?  Think about the movies and TV shows out there about characters with some chronic physical disease who miraculously recover because they met their soul-mate. There aren’t many, because the idea is absurd—lucking into that girl with fetching dimples or that guy with the winning smile is nice, but it won’t cure your cancer. Ali McGraw was sick and plenty in love in Love Story, and she still died.

            But in movies like David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, mental health is really just a matter of global attitude adjustment. The power of psychoanalysis, drug treatments, behavioral modification all pale next to the bluebird of happiness. Indeed, not only is mental health just a yank on the bootstrap away, it has become a handy obstacle to be overcome on the way to romantic remission. In classic literature from Shakespeare to Hemingway, barriers of political or class or family kept star cross’d lovers apart. With those social obstacles largely irrelevant now, only our own psychoses and neuroses—how much we are “damaged goods”—really stand in the way of “ever after”.

            In a world of Wes Andersons and Todd Solondzes, Russell (Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings) is still no slouch in the quirkiness department. His version of the Matthew Quick novel gives us Bradley Cooper as Pat, an ex-teacher of history who went a ways around the bend after discovering his wife in flagrante with a colleague. We meet him after he’s spent eight court-mandated months in an institution, still trying to get over the violent rage he feels whenever he hears Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour”—the tune that was playing the moment he discovered spouse and lover in the shower. (No word whether he also goes berserk at the Jermaine Jackson and Andy Williams covers of that song too.)

This concept is just one step above the old Abbot and Costello “slowly I turned…” routine, where Abbott assaults Costello when the latter says the trigger word. Fortunately, Cooper (The Hangover, Limitless) is likeable enough to make the role work, right down to the character’s pie-in-the-sky dreams of winning back his wife and his old job. He’s matched quirk-for-quirk and symptom-for-symptom by a pugnacious and fetching Jennifer Lawrence, whose Tiffany is coping with young widowhood and temporary nymphomania. They’re both barking mad, but clash companionably.

The unconvincing part of this lies in the redemption, which somehow involves a dance competition against professionals that Pat and Tiffany would never qualify for, with results that would put the makers of Xanax and Abilify out of business. It’s not the notion of crazy love that takes Russell’s screenplay a bridge too far—it’s the idea that crazy love makes lovers sane, instead of just more crazy. In the end, Russell only proves that he never took his characters’ peculiarities seriously in the first place.

All of which is a shame, because Cooper and Lawrence seem to have real chemistry. Robert De Niro comes along in his best Meet the Parents comedic supporting mode, and Chris Tucker is pleasantly non-screechy as Pat’s somewhat crazier in-mate. (No doubt only guys like Tucker or Chris Rock could get away with telling Cooper to “black it up” as he practices his dance routine.)  

Russell is on the side of the angels as he continues to tell character-driven stories about live, non-CGI figures. Unfortunately, for a film about “silver linings”, Playbook’s virtues are all of the surface.  

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro