I loved it

Rating: 9/10 (30 November 2012)

Pat (Bradley Cooper) comes home to find his teacher wife having a shower with another teacher, who Pat promptly beats to a pulp. Eight months later, Pat is discharged from mental hospital - complete with restraining order - into the care of his mother, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the meantime. All is clearly not well with him, however: there is clear evidence that his grip on reality and reason is not always all that it could be, because he remains tightly focused on being reunited with the wife who has the restraining order on him (we also see that Pat's OCD father (Robert De Niro) may well be the source of some of Pat's problems). Into his life comes Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young woman recently widowed and with obvious issues of her own in terms of dealing with the depression caused by her grief. A quid pro quo develops: Tiffany will act as a mailbox for letters between Pat and wife, and Pat will be a dancing partner for Tiffany for a contest she has entered as therapy.
This film does not tidily fit into a category: it is essentially a drama, though with romantic and comedic elements. And it has a couple of fairly severe flaws. The bet which fuels the third act is pretty obviously no more than a dramatic device to raise the stakes in the dance contest and has a distinct whiff of improbability about it, and the ending appears inconsistent with the attitudes of the protagonists. These are both fairly serious criticisms to level at a film which takes itself seriously, nowithstanding its comedic elements.
And I didn't care. I liked this film very much indeed. It plays fair with the mental problems suffered by Pat and Tiffany: while drawing humour from them, they are never the butt of insensitive jokes. Bradley Cooper makes Pat believable, and Jennifer Lawrence is heart-achingly poignant as Tiffany (she is also sizzlingly sexy, particularly in the final dance, but that's merely a bonus). You always want these two damaged people to find, in each other, the means to achieve a measure of happiness, and you are never 100% sure whether the film will take you there by the end or not.
And if the film leaves you pondering the relative merits of consistency versus satisfaction, well so what?