Silver Linings Playbook

     Silver Linings Playbook reminds us how much weight a conventional Hollywood genre can bear, if you trust it. By the Romantic Comedy conventions, two attractive young people meet “cute”, i.e., with instinctive mutual dislike, then overcome the obstacles to romantic fulfillment at the end. In the classic theatre comedy, the young sexual energies that may threaten to disrupt the social order are instead harnessed to renew it through the ritual of marriage.

     The film refreshens the genre in several ways. Its romantic heroes both have clinical psychological disorders, with self-destructive, even violent, impulses. But both are suffering from the loss of their life mates. Pat (Bradley Cooper) was institutionalized after beating up his high school teaching colleague he caught in the shower with wife Nikki (Brea Bee). Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) is a recovering sex addict whose husband died -- coincidentally, after she’d lost sexual interest in him. The seriousness of their respective losses encourages our acceptance, even identification, with these unusual romantic leads. 

     Part of the film’s brilliance lies in its realistic depiction of these troubled psyches, with their rampaging highs and lows. Part lies in the witty, complex dialogue. Within a speech, even within a sentence, a character will swerve between extremes in sentiment, desire, self-understanding, outreach and retreat. 

     As the film embraces as normal troubled characters we might feel to be some Other, it finds reflection in the more socially acceptable community. Pat’s father (Robert de Niro) is obsessive/compulsive about his gambling on football games. Pat’s mother (named sadly) Dolores (Jacki Weaver) mutely cares for both Pats, father and son, accepting both men’s irrational behaviour and her own quiet role in life. Pat Sr’s predicament -- forced by the loss of his job to run a bookie operation -- typifies the new American socio-economic reality. His superstitious need to have Pat Jr present for the Eagles game is reversed by Tiffany’s reverse argument. Such compulsions and rituals are at best irrational security blankets, at worst destructive. As she ultimately wins Pat Jr by doing something crazier than him, she first wins over Pat Sr by rejigging his superstition about the Eagles games. In both cases she respects and addresses their nature. 

     The film’s climax involves Pat Sr’s bet on an NFL game and the dance contest Tiffany has entered with Pat Jr. The football game is an emblem of America’s obsession with the violent, win-at-all-costs, neo-religion (rooted in Sunday but creeping out throughout the week), the NFL. The dance is the more intimate teamwork, two partners, yet another exercise in physical grace that has been turned into competition. When the big bet requires Pat and Tiffany to score only five out of ten the film rejects the sport’s absolute requirement to win and accepts the couple’s doing their best. By implication, “good enough” is the healthy standard for people with or without mental or physical challenges. 

     Making Pat’s doctor, Cliff Patel (Anupam Kher), an East Indian who is also an eager Eagles fan provides another example of an Other joining the mainstream society. Normally a therapist should not become personally engaged with a patient, but Dr Patel enters Pat’s outside world via the socially respectable madness of football fandom. His enthusiasm shows the sense of community that transcends barriers, cultural, ethnic, professional. Philadelphia is, after all, the city of brotherly love. This title is challenged when racists attack Dr Patel at the game but reaffirmed when Pat and his friends fight to protect him.  

     Throughout this romance nothing plays out in the conventional way. When Pat compliments Tiffany’s appearance he immediately adds that he’s practicing to be more attentive to his wife, whom he didn’t compliment enough. When Tiffany says “You’re not a standup guy today, Pat,” she viscerally knows the vicissitudes of someone’s character and moods. She is the more understanding of the two. When Pat says he thinks she’s the worst thing that ever happened to him, she easily responds: “Of course you do. Let’s dance.” Their labored practice for the competition plays against the tradition of Fred Astaire courting his Ginger Rogers characters through an elegant dance. However sordid her recent past and her language, she has fought through to the most self-awareness and self-acceptance in the film: “There’s always going to be a part of me that’s sloppy and dirty, but I like that. With all the other parts of myself.” (Pat’s mother tacitly lives out another kind of acceptance.) The couple panic when they find themselves holding hands: 

Pat: Wait, what’s this?

Tiffany: I thought you were doing it.

Pat: I thought you were doing it.

As the dance practice and performance lead them to realize their love, each is manipulating the other, Tiffany with her forged letter from Nikki, Pat by his pretending to believe it. He lied to her for a week because “I was trying to be romantic.” 

     Essentially the film redefines both what’s normal and what’s moral in our society. It undermines our habitual rejection of people who may need drugs, or who have mental or economic problems, or who for whatever reason seem to be an Other we’re inclined to reject. The film establishes a close community within Philadelphia where the Outsider -- whether an obsessive compulsive, a doctor turned green-faced Oriental Eagles fan, a black inmate determined to escape -- can be warmly accepted. Tiffany’s parents nervously keep her semi-tethered  in her own little backyard cottage, but she works out a fuller embrace by Pat and his parents. Tiffany’s love saves Pat from the self-abnegation his obsession with recovering Nikki and his wearing a garbage bag connote. In life as in football you need a gamebook -- strategies, whether behavioral or medicinal -- if you’re going to salvage some silver linings from all the heavy clouds out there and inside.

     The film seems almost European in its language and its confrontation of social and psychological complexity. The tidy wrapping up of all those loose ends may seem like the obligatory American happy ending. But the conclusion fulfills not just the imperatives of the classic genre but the characters’ resilience. This film gives us hope for our troubled and a model for a genuinely warm and integrated community. The characters have earned that resolution.