AT THE MOVIES

With

David Begelman

“Silver Linings Playbook:” Mental Illness As Cinematic Blessing

David O. Russell’s new film about a couple beleaguered by psychiatric problems seems to have delighted most critics reviewing it. It received a 91% favorable rating from them on the “Rotten Tomatoes” website, precisely the same percentage of enthusiasm accorded the film by the average public moviegoer. Evidently, the movie is an enormously popular one with a huge majority of those seeing it. 

Pundits feel it’s slated for Academy Awards. As far as nominations go, it would be the first film in 31 years marked for winning in all four acting categories: Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence as Best Actor and Actress, and Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver in Best Supporting Actor and Actress roles. The last movie to draw a similar accolade was the 1981 “Reds.”

Not that awards should matter all that much. They beg a huge question about the taste of officials who confer them. Jennifer Lawrence just garnered a Golden Globe Award for her role in Russell’s film, true. But Ben Affleck’s “Argo” received one over “Lincoln.” This doesn’t leave me thinking: “Did I miss something?” but “I wonder how many Golden Globe referees have it in for Steven Spielberg.” 

On the other side of things, several minority critics have trashed “Silver Linings Playbook” as “the year’s most artificial movie…filled with faked case histories,” and a plot that is “utterly ridiculous.”

Like Tevya the dairyman in “Fiddler On the Roof,” I would opt for a more conciliatory note: both opinions are right. It depends on which half of the film you’re watching.

The movie, about the relationship between a patient consigned to the care of his parents after discharge from a mental hospital, and a youngish widow as perceptive as she is unstable, is itself a case of divided personality. Its first half exudes genuine charm laced with some well-crafted dialogue between Pat (Cooper) and Tiffany (Lawrence), combining humor with their instability.

Cooper’s portrayal of an essentially likeable guy cursed with bipolar disorder has to be the most realistic—and humorous—depiction of the condition in movie history. Between episodes of normalcy and contrition, he flies into sudden rages, becomes delusional and agitated without provocation, and has a hard time accommodating to the demands of the realities around him.

Because Pat refuses to take his medication, treatment sessions with his shrink, Dr. Patel (played by Anupam Kher in an understandably restrained manner, given Pat’s turbulent mental state) is a lesson in how ineffective office analysis can be when confronted with conditions impervious to reason.

Lawrence’s portrayal of Tiffany, also a mental patient mourning the loss of her spouse, has a personality disorder that makes the sparks fly when the two interact, despite their mutual attraction. Both the screenplay and the two performers are at their best in the first half of the movie when they have at each other in a virtual symphony of clashing temperaments.

Half way through the film the action gets encumbered by silly and extraneous narratives involving many others including a parent, Pat Senior (De Niro). He has a chronic OCD problem, a long-suffering spouse, Dolores (Weaver), a gambling problem and some magical thinking. The latter involves how arranging a dance contest between his son and Tiffany will come to affect the outcome of a game played by his beloved Philadelphia Eagles football team. To add to all the fuss, the screenplay includes a mental patient buddy of Pat’s, Danny (Chris Tucker) who contrives to teach Pat and Tiffany how to jive up the number they intend to perform in the contest.

Then there is the addition of a problematic relationship between Ronnie (John Ortiz) and Veronica (Julia Stiles), not to mention the one between Pat and his ex-wife, Nikki (Brea Bee), as well as the occasional arrival of a cop (Dash Mihok) to prevent the outbreak of violence, violation of a restraining order or a donnybrook among macho members of separate football teams. It’s a drawn-out and overly complicated narrative detracting from the tone set initially by the two principals.

The film tends to become formulaic as Pat and Tiffany draw closer together. Their rapprochement loses the spice it generated earlier as they both morph into seeming normalcy. George Bernard Shaw warned against the pitfalls of the happy ending in his Sequel to “Pygmalion.” Maybe it’s better at times that characters on the stage, screen or in literature stay a little dotty, if only to avoid the humdrum, or—horrors!—the platitudinous.

             

 

Film Review: “The Hunger Games”

David Begelman

The film adaptation of the first book of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy, “The Hunger Games” is set in a post-apocalyptic North America of the haves and have-nots. It’s the same North America that has dominated the market on bad, overblown and over-budgeted films, although the definition of “good” is admittedly up for grabs in many quarters.

For example, Jeff Bock of the Los Angeles Exhibitor Relations Company feels that along with “The Hunger Games,” the quality of films is getting “exponentially better this year,” a claim he eerily attempts to justify by referring to the superlative marketing strategies of the studios in appealing to “very specific demographics.”

Evidently, Mr. Bock’s standard of excellence boils down—as you probably surmised—to what brings in the bucks. A movie that cashes in to the tune of nearly a quarter of a billion since March 23 just has to be of superior artistic mettle! Maybe the conclusion is inescapable in Hollywood, especially since the profits were gargantuan: the film cost only 80 million to make.

Some of us harbor a quite different measure of excellence, and not because we are nervous Nellies over film violence. After all, we can revere films like “Paths of Glory,” “The French Connection,” (and if post-apocalyptical themes are your pleasure, “Blade Runner”) that abound in violence. Except unlike “The Hunger Games” they are not suffused with violence that is plainly gratuitous or laced remorselessly with inane artifice.

“The Hunger Games” is formulaic precisely because we have seen it all before in movies, from the Japanese “Battle Royale” in which youngsters are sent to a place where they fight each other to the death, to “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” where a ruthless power elite stages battles to the death of contestants introduced to their contests by a ghoulish M.C. who announces, “It’s Killing Time!” And we are reminded of Golding’s  “Lord of the Flies,” in which kids form an inbred and homicidal civilization.

Director Gary Ross’s flick is about the adventures of Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence, in transparently a downturn from her arresting characterization as an Ozark girl in “Winter’s Bone”). Katniss hails from an impoverished district her tormentors envision as the underbelly of their brave new world. She is a huntress, adept at stalking game with bow and arrow, providing for her starving family, and manifesting an individualism that one overlord, President Snow (Donald Sutherland), fears in youngsters for whom hope springs eternal.

Katniss volunteers to substitute for her younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields) in a game in which teenagers are forced to fight to the death while their exploits are broadcast on television. Katniss prevails against all odds, and escapes to the woods (albeit a bit more hastily than heroines in “As You Like It” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream”), hides in trees, gets assailed by peers with nothing but winning and murder on their minds and by electronically devised hounds that are combos of enormous pit-bulls and Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld.

All of which proves that when you produce a film that conflates reality shows, video-games, survival themes, and cops and robbers scenarios with a youth culture as  put-upons, you get to score mightily—especially if you’re on the youngish side. And we can do without cinematographer Tom Stern’s obvious filching from “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield” the distracting device of filming with hand-held camera, as if the jerky outcome were somehow a fast track to cinematic realism.

 “Do you know where your kids are?” Evidently, many parents do—they’re at the movies, even when the film is tedious and, in this case, hazardous to your aesthetic health.