Don't Totally Buy the Happy Ending, But That Doesn't Mean I Don't Like It

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2012)

Much of the talk swirling around "Silver Linings Playbook" has centered on Jennifer Lawrence and her feisty performance, but Bradley Cooper is the one who impressed me. Nothing I've yet seen Cooper in prepared me for how good an actor he can be given the right direction and material.
The direction and material in this case is supplied by David O. Russell, who has made one movie I outright love ("I Heart Huckabees") and a few others ("Three Kings", "The Fighter") that have been almost as good. I'm not sure I'd class "Silver Linings Playbook" at quite the same level, but it's pretty darn good. Cooper, who dominates the film and is in nearly every single scene, plays a troubled man recently released from an institution and determined to get well. Lawrence is an agitated young woman who's got all sorts of issues of her own, and we wait to see if this odd couple is going to end up together at the movie's end. Russell is not a conventional filmmaker, so a happy ending, or at least a conventional one, is not necessarily guaranteed, and I guess the fact that the film ends by resolving everything a little too neatly after giving us such a serious, unrelentingly grim first half is by biggest quibble with it. Still, it's nice to think a story like the one portrayed here could end the way this one does, even if I don't really believe it would.
Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver play Cooper's mom and dad, and in a few scenes, Russell is able to brilliantly convey the family dynamic that led to Cooper's issues in the first place.
Grade: A-