'Silver Linings' Won't Win, But It Should

Rating: 8/10 (14 June 2013)

I remember in 1998 when As Good As It Gets went up against Titanic for the Best Picture Oscar. I remember thinking that it was no contest. Titanic was just too big and too awesome (yeah, I liked it). But what film have I watched at least once a year since? Here's a hint: Nobody dies in it.
As Good As It Gets continues to charm me as an example of how a village of dysfunctional but honest people can not only save each other, but drastically improve each other's lives.
Enter Silver Linings Playbook starring Bradley Cooper as the recently released mental patient willing himself to overcome his bi-polar disorder without medication and finding aid from an unlikely mentor (Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone)) recovering from her own grief-driven nymphomania. Most self-help books would tell us that this match is an absolute disaster waiting to happen, but David O. Russell's writing and direction actually sell us on how it can work.
This starts with a scene fairly early on in the film. Pat (Cooper) and Tiffany (Lawrence) openly compare notes on psyche meds to the horror of their unhappily married hosts Ronnie (John Ortiz) and Veronica (Julia Stiles). This is an odd conversation but it is played with such charm that we are with them. Their gleeful candor tells us they're okay. The embarrassed hosts on the other side of the table, however, are not.
This theme repeats throughout the film. Pat and Tiffany do "weird" things or tell their thoughts too openly, loudly or at the wrong time of night. But one thing comes through in every scene from these characters: honesty, honesty, honesty. And we love them for it.
We love them because we see our own family on the screen and we think of just how fun it would be to have a Pat or Tiffany come over and hurl open the closets in our own house, just as long as we're not there or it's not about anything we don't want said, but yeah we kinda want it. Don't we? Over the past few weeks, we've been listening to platitudes from cultural and political leaders about how we need to have a "serious conversation" about mental illness in this country. That's about how far it's gone. In truth, we'd rather yell about guns or violent movies instead of looking at a significant portion of our population who are tired of having to hide, take their meds, and not do anything "unusual" so they can avoid strange looks and do their best to fit into "normal" society.
Silver Linings offers an alternate view. While it is ambivalent about meds (as it should be, because lets face it: meds, for many, can be a bridge over troubled waters), it is very clear about one thing. What we view as illness might very well be a magnificent personality making its way to the surface. And what we view as normal or functional might be completely dysfunctional and destructive.
The key, the film seems to argue, is community.
Americans like to feel good about themselves and this year's Oscar lineup gives us plenty to feel good about. We enjoy watching our country abolish slavery, rescue hostages and assassinate a monster. Those things are easy for us to enjoy because there is a clear right from wrong, especially after the hindsight of history. Silver Linings Playbook, however, challenges us to reconsider what we think of as weird, scary or dysfunctional and it calls into question our "normal" way of treating those we consider to be "abnormal".