Without a strategy you get nowhere

Rating: 5/10 (24 March 2013)

'You need a strategy!' is the advice that Pat's therapist gives him to master his bipolar disorder and the violent outbursts that come with it. This is good advice, and something that the writer/director should have taken himself, as it seems to be the thing this movie lacks.
First, this is not a comedy. There are no jokes,no humorous situations, and the witty quips are seldom spot on. The movie unfolds as a dramatic story of a psychiatric patient's reintegration in society after his treatment. A valuable cause that is played out pleasurably understated, and confronts the audience with the tension between theory and practice, and how families and patients cope. It helps that Pat is played by the hunky Bradley Cooper who oozes good will, for some decisions Pat makes border on dangerous ground.
Enter Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany, a fellow patient, struggling with the loss of her husband; okay, two people in their craziness against the world, that is a theme. But just as the movie lingers on, seemingly about the daily life of these people and their families, we are confronted with some sidelines, and without a warning we are just a few plot twists away from a dance therapy center for troubled youth, and could the movie be renamed Step Up 5 or Dirty Dancing 3.
Then we get the relapse (on a very sunny and warm day for December), and a crazy bet that is such an obvious plot device to 'wrap it all up' that the rest of the movie is as predictable as it gets, abandoning the theme, changing from perspective (to Tiffany's) and all secondary characters join in the victory and the get together of the two leads, when suddenly it is suggested that Tiffany wasn't crazy at all and just played crazy to gain Pat's trust to get closer to him. Oh what?
It unnerves me that Jennifer Lawrence has received an Academy Award for this role of a crazy, non-crazy, lying, non-lying woman, so very unsympathetic and so badly written. Robert de Niro displays all the laziness he gets away with, culminating in an atrociously acted angry scene, exemplary for first year drama students. Cooper forgets in the last quarter of the film that he is a psychiatric patient, becoming the sensible, down to earth, perfect specimen of a man as by magic.
Not a comedy, not a drama and certainly not a dance movie (with such an important dancing scene one would hope they hired actors who could actually dance a little bit and not strut around like vegetables on sleeping meds). A very mediocre effort on all accounts.