The first time I saw Silver Linings Playbook I loved it immediately. It was heartfelt, honest, gritty, and unlike any other Hollywood romantic comedy I had ever seen. It also boasted incredible performances: from Jennifer Lawrence, whose performance deservedly won her an Oscar, and remains her finest; from Bradley Cooper, who proved to America he could fucking act; from Robert DeNiro, who reminded America he could fucking act; and from Jackie Weaver, who emerged from obscurity (at least for me, I had never heard of her before) to play one of the most convincing Italian-American mothers on screen.
The first time around, I remember thinking it felt so “real”; as with Russell’s previous film The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook looked and felt to me like a document of American family life.
Re-watching it years later, the film could not have felt more artificial to me. Of course, I was very late to this observation—erudite curmudgeon and occasional homeless person Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote at the time:
It may be the year’s most artificial movie… the plot is utterly ridiculous, the characters are created merely to fulfill its requirements, and whatever charm and integrity the movie possesses issues from the actors, who do their damnedest to lend their scriptbots flesh and soul… the deterministic world of the movie is script-settled and it’s all thumbs up.
But where Brody found fault in the film’s artifice, I found something beautiful and seemingly unique that I think defines David O. Russell as a filmmaker: he assumes the veneer of authenticity, but only insofar as a means of joyously colliding with the artificiality inherent to film as a medium. His films seem to exist in a genre entirely on their own; they use the real to delight in the fake. And that’s no accident: Russell is well-known for his on-the-cuff, improvisatory directing style, encouraging actors to ad-lib and shooting scenes with significantly less planning and camera set-up than usual.
2010′s The Fighter saw Russell beginning to develop this aesthetic—which two films later now defines him as one of America’s most visionary directors.* Although the film tethered Russell to the responsibilities of telling a true story from a script he didn’t write—replete with all the generic requirements of an underdog-boxer story—he still found some room to define the visual style for which he is now widely known: a dynamic camera—typically handheld—constantly in motion, whimsical, fluid; like an incredibly self-indulgent documentarian. The Fighter also demonstrated Russell’s uncanny knack for bringing about visceral, transcendent, career-defining performances from his actors.
Silver Linings Playbook functions as a perfect representation of Russell’s style blooming, evolving, and defining him as an auteur filmmaker. Brody was right: the film is pure artifice. It’s based on a book, it inhabits a very traditional Hollywood genre (romantic comedy), and thus follows film structure to the letter. It sets out clear-cut thematic concerns, with characters that evolve and develop accordingly. With this second viewing, the artifice was glaringly obvious… and it shocked me. How could I not have noticed it the first time? How could I have ever labeled this a “real” film? I rejected the artificiality at first, but then quickly grew to appreciate it as the film went along. It creates a fascinating stylistic tension in each scene: between the contrivance of the situation, and the raw intensity of the performances. A movie scene itself is inherently artificial; it places people into a pre-ordained scenario intended to develop plot, character and theme (in the very traditional sense of what constitutes a film). Russell places his actors into these scenarios, but does not seem to tie them down to the mechanics of written dialogue. He wants us to focus not so much on what these people are saying, but more importantly: what their words say about who they are. I remember less about what Pat Sr. (De Niro) and Dolores (Weaver) Solitano ask Pat Jr. (Cooper) in their many living room scenes together than about how they asked him, and the dynamic between all three of them in conversation. They’ll ask Pat about Tiffany or something about the dance recital he’s been helping her out with, but the haphazard manner with which De Niro and Weaver chime in and over each other suggests they were never given specific lines to begin with. They’ll just say, “So what’s this thing you’re doing?” “Yeah Pat, what are you going to do about this thing?” I think Russell does family better than Spielberg because he cares so much more about convincing us that we’re watching a family talking instead of focusing on what they’re talking about. And therein lies the beautiful tension between fake and real in Russell’s films. I agree with Brody that the plot is utterly ridiculous and contrived, but I don’t think Russell seemed to ever give a fuck about the plot: there’s some mishegas about Pat Sr.’s restaurant that barely gets mentioned, until suddenly all the money for that restaurant gets bet on an Eagles game… there’s a dance competition, mentioned by name maybe once or twice, Pat and Tiffany train every day for it, but they’re not even training to win it, and then suddenly the stakes of the whole film appear to rest entirely on whether or not they perform mediocrely at the competition… And then there are minor subplots with characters whose marriages are falling apart, Pat’s ex-wife, something involving Chris Tucker… Which is all to say that I think Russell wants us to notice the difference between that which feels contrived (plot, dialogue) and that which feels organic (performance).
Because above all else, I think Russell prioritizes character; his films are fundamentally about human people and their relationships with each other. I didn’t care about whether or not Pat Sr. had enough money for his restaurant, or whether or not Pat Jr. and Tiffany won their dance competition, or whether or not Pat’s ex-wife would notice how much Pat had matured… I cared about why these people came together, and about who they became over the course of the film. I don’t remember the building blocks of how Pat and Tiffany fell in love with each other. Sure, the mechanics of romantic comedy structure were in there: they meet, they don’t like each other at first, she bothers him, then he bothers her, then he helps her with X, then she helps him with the person he thinks he’s in love with, then there’s conflict, then she sees him with that person he thinks he’s in love with, then he realizes the love he was looking for was always right under his nose the whole time, then they come together etc. But these elements felt pieced together so loosely and informally, given deference to representing who Pat and Tiffany were as people and how they interacted with each other, that when they finally come together, it’s not about what they did to get there, it’s about who they are to each other when they do. And they don’t even come together until maybe one or two minutes before the credits roll… and holy fuck is it sweet. I felt more cathartic during their kiss at the end than during the ending kisses of almost every other romantic comedy combined. Because while now I see how obviously fake the movie around Pat and Tiffany is, they feel real to me; we’ve been with them for two hours of anxiety and suffering, we’ve felt their confusion and their insecurities, but we know they belong together, and when does that ever happen in real life? In real life, if you’re fucked up in the head you probably don’t think you’ll ever end up with a person you deserve, you probably don’t think that true love exists, or you’ve probably told someone you’ve loved them and they’ve told you they don’t love you and it made you feel like shit for 6 years after that.
So yeah, when I watch Silver Linings Playbook it makes me believe in love, it makes me think love is real, and it makes me feel all fluttery and sweet and gumdrops and marshmallow smiles inside, and there aren’t any many movies that can do that.
**Although I actually think that American Hustle is a better example of Russell’s style—and likely a better movie overall—I wanted to focus here on Playbook and what makes it so great.**