Film review: Silver Linings Playbook
Some people have called Silver Linings Playbook a version of Garden State set in suburban Philadelphia, but it is a much more mature, more intimate and less playful piece of work than its 2004 sibling. The film features Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), a man with some serious mental issues following a breakdown he suffered after discovering his wife in the shower with another man. In the course of the film, he will meet another former mental patient who will support him, and he her, on their journey to becoming more or less fully functioning members of society again.
It sounds a little Hollywood, and it is, but director David O. Russell – who headed the genre-bending, brightly lit commercial take on the meaning of life in I Heart Huckabees, a stunning piece of work with remarkable emotional depth – puts equal measures of head and heart into Silver Linings Playbook, and the result plays to a large audience using methods different from those employed by many other filmmakers.
Solitano is bipolar, and at the beginning of the film the viewer is bound to be a little scared of what damage he is capable of doing without meaning to. He seems arrogant and ignores everyone around him because he believes people are conspiring against him while he alone has the insight and the knowledge to fight against the darkness. Given his history of eight months spent at Baltimore’s Karel Psychiatric Facility, he also feels like he has learned enough to fix other people, including treating his father’s symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Read the full story at The Prague Post.
(Still of Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook. © 2012 – The Weinstein Company via imdb.com)
