One of this fall’s first Oscar-worthy films has put Philadelphia on the silver screen as the backdrop to a touching story about a man’s search for love – lost, found, and covered up by a self-induced curtain of mental illness, therapy, and medication.
Silver Linings Playbook, writer/director David O. Russell’s look at a family’s struggles with a son who has just returned from a mental hospital, is at times charming, darkly humorous, and gripping.
Former teacher Pat (Bradley Cooper) is slowly readjusting to society after leaving treatment for bipolar disorder. He longs to reunite with his wife, Nikki, whose affair with a colleague put Pat in treatment in the first place.
After a chance encounter with a girl who has issues of her own (Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence of Hunger Games fame), Pat sees a chance at reuniting with his wife. The two bargain with each other to get what they most want – for Pat, it’s a chance to see Nikki again; for Tiffany, it’s a chance to use Pat as a dance partner in a competition.
While pursuing those things, both find a balance point with each other, and the on-screen chemistry between Cooper and Lawrence is as genuine as it gets.
In what is easily the best performance of his acting career, Cooper (The Hangover, Limitless) takes the viewer on the seesaw of his raw emotion in coping with a father (Robert DeNiro, in his usual gruff persona) who has been ravaged with OCD for most of his life.
Routines are important for Pat’s father. Every Sunday in the fall, he wears the same old Eagles clothes, puts the remote controls in the same spot, and insists that the positioning of people on couches has everything to do with whether the Eagles win or not.
Now that he’s running a sports book, routines are important and serve as a major source of conflict between father and son.
Area viewers will appreciate the local flavor in Silver Linings, especially the tailgating outside an Eagles game at Lincoln Financial Field and shots of Upper Darby, where most of this film was shot (Bonner-Prendie HS makes a cameo in one scene).
Even if the Eagles aren’t going to be Super Bowl bound any time soon, Silver Linings Playbook delivers a winner to the City of Brotherly Love.