Overrated but fairly typical indie drama

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2014)

Over the years, indie films have become, in many ways, as formulaic as the Hollywood blockbusters that are their supposed opposites. Silver Linings Playbook is such a film. It is a standard misfit romance that tries to combine quirk with pathos(as is often the case, its fence straddling between the two means it does neither well), and the ending is pat even by Hollywood standards.
It's also a movie that rings false throughout. This is not mental illness, this is movie-mental illness, in which a set of symptoms are chosen based on what the director wants the characters to do and feel. My social-worker girlfriend said the guy really struck her as more developmentally disabled than mentally ill, and while that would never have occurred to me, I can see her point. He's really more badly behaved than anything else, and it's hard to tell if his main problem is mental illness or just a streak of stupidity. His emotional evolution makes no sense as well; the change is too fast, radical and complete to be considered remotely real, and we don't really see it happening.
Even the dance contest in the end doesn't seem real; it is as though two separate contests are overlapped.
There are good moments in the movie. Jennifer Lawrence, while probably not really deserving of her Oscar, does a nice job of creating someone both tough and emotionally fragile. There are also bad moments, like a surprisingly off-key "emotional" scene with De Niro.
There was a time, back in the 1990s, when an indie movie promised something that was in some way different. I miss those days.