It's 2012 Hollywood

Rating: 5/10 (4 February 2013)

There is a lot to love about this movie: it portraits real Americans, with real money concerns and no magical solutions for it, and real behavioral issues (both the one who spent time in a mental institution and those who are out, but may not be so sane after all). It also has terrific performances by De Niro (I had to place him first, since it's been a while since he played such an interesting and complex character), Cooper and Lawrence.
But then again, this is a Hollywood product. Once upon a time, people with mental issues were depicted as uniformly bad, dangerous for the sane population and either confined in an institution or in the process of being taken to one, usually after committing some horrible crime. That was dumb and justly forgotten. Then some other movies would portrait mental patients as possessing some sort of hidden wisdom, seeing deeper truths that most mere mortals cannot reach. While not impossible given the fact that many perfectly sane persons were sent to mental hospitals for political or other spurious reasons, this is not representative of the majority of cases. And then a few movies dared showing mental illnesses for what they often are -grim, hard to bear both for the patient and those around him/her, and often requiring life long treatment, sometimes to "cure", sometimes just to keep under some sort of control.
In this movie (I checked the spoilers alert box) two people with issues meet, and begin working together on themselves (the "stategy" as they call it). That's perfectly believable. But then they get the usual Hollywood epiphany, including not just one improbable personal victory but two, and as the TV show says, it's always sunny in Philadelphia. That was just too much. It's not that happy endings are a bad thing per se. But when there are so many clouds in someone's life, a victory could be, for example, just accepting your issues. There was no need for a "and they lived happily ever after" ending. It is still worth watching, but not as great as it could have been.