TOO MUCH SILVER LINING, UNDERESTIMATING GRAY

DIRECTED BY DAVID O. RUSSELL 

STARRING: BRADLEY COOPER, JENNIFER LAWRENCE, ROBERT DE NIRO, JACKIE WEAVER, JOHN ORTIZ, JULIA STILES, SHEA WIGHAM, PAUL HERMAN with CHRIS TUCKER and ANUPAM KHER 

There’s something good and great about putting all your cards on the table. It also tells me whether I’d want to play my hand as part of an informed decision. It’s double-edged; it’s also the only way to go. The world can thrive on lies, deceit and sleights of hand. I wouldn’t want to. I put all my cards on the table. I’d expect you to do that as well. Fairness could be over-demanding like that. And it’s only fair that it is, if you think about it. 

‘the Silver Linings Playbook’ is a lot like Tiffany Maxwell (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s the page-turner on David O. Russell’s script. She’s the meta-statement he makes through the film. She’s an active part of the rhetoric as well. I’d get back to that at a later point on this review, but accepting her is similar to accepting the film; it’s too tempting not to. By that I don’t mean a one-woman no-show. The film is anything but that. And, nonetheless, this is a woman who had held her whole office to ransom before she went to war with herself. The promos call it ‘sex-addiction.’ I think that’s a bad term to call the situation itself, to begin with, let alone hers. But she has a reputation. 

Patrick ‘Pat’ Solitano (Bradley Cooper, in his first ever acting role) sticks his neck out to change that reputation of hers. He’s fresh out of a mental facility and is diagnosed as having been undiagnosed bipolar – Dr. Patel (Anupam Kher) does that diagnosis for the audience. Their interaction is convenient. You come to learn that Pat - previously a history-sub at the local school - had assaulted the history teacher whom his wife Nikki (Brea Bee, unspeaking) had an affair with. You come to learn there’s a trigger (Zoolander, anyone?) – ‘My Cherie Amour’ by Stevie Wonder – their wedding song that was, ironically, playing when he caught them in the shower together. You come to learn he has a history with delusion and violence, in the fact that he almost beat the man to death. You come to learn there is a restraining order. 

This is as useful as any Indian actor has ever been in a Hollywood motion picture. 

Oh, and even though you don’t really need Dr. Patel for that, you come to learn that Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) is just about as crazy. And when I call Pat crazy, I don’t refer to his diagnosed condition as much as I refer to the method he chooses to fight it. It’s called ‘Excelsior’ – a Latin term that translates to ‘ever upward’ – as American as it can get. In fact, it’s supposed to be the motto of New York city, something the Eagles should’ve known before they let Pat hit the stands in their game against the Giants. Pat intends to recycle his negative energies, put them in the garbage bag he wears, and transform them into positive energies. Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) tries something similar with his ‘seven-step success’ plan in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, if you remember. Both films represent as much as they parody the American household. 

Russell does a good job fleshing out the characters that make the household and beyond, most of whom have a mix of craft and genuineness to back them, in terms of actors and performances. Jackie Weaver, as the ever-frightened Dolores Solitano, Pat’s mother who shuttles between two madmen – one who bets his life and future on a Football team, the other finding himself entangled in such a wager – is a revelation. Russell won Melissa Leo the Supporting Actress Oscar, last time around. Ms. Weaver is among the lot this time –I’m glad she is. It’s hard to play married to De Niro, the comic. You’ve seen Blythe Danner patronize him in the ‘Meet the Parents’ series. There are those Hollywood type parents who win your love with the way they screw up. Weaver, however, sets her own unblemished record. She inspires sincerity in a film that makes an effort to live up to hers. 

Now, I spoke of Pat’s entanglements – there are two. Pat Sr. who wants father-and-son time on his own holds one end of the line. The other belongs to the ex-wife inside Pat’s head – a commitment he had made to himself. To help him transcend, Tiffany entangles herself in both. What follows is two Hollywood clichés – of the messenger and the guiding light – in a film that states quite clearly it doesn’t want to play out like Ernest fucking Hemingway wrote it. 

Here, I come back to my first point on how the film spreads its cards out on the table for everyone to see. It looks promising. You look at yours; you play Pat to its Tiffany impersonation. You have your own ex-wives and Father-concepts, right? Films have come and films have gone that have told you it’s okay to be crazy – the whole world is. ‘the Silver Linings Playbook’ falls in line. It skates on thin ice with denser material below. Like I said, there’s an ex-wife in the picture. We don’t really know the reality in that relationship. Nikki (unspeaking, as I deliberated) doesn’t have her say. Pat has his. It’s David O. Russell speaking, actually. He wants his happy ending. Tiffany deserves it. Jennifer Lawrence, the hottest choice to play self-confident-but-fragile these days, deserves it too. 

Still, I find myself in disagreement. Maybe because I like my Hemingways and Alexander Paynes intact. Maybe because (and this is crucial) by putting itself out there, saving nothing for mystery, the film happened to reduce itself to an option than a mind-instructed, necessary pursuit – pretty much the risk that Tiffany runs, half the time. There’s a voice inside my head that said “the worst I can do right now is consent to marry you,” on Pat’s behalf. Maybe I think the girl doesn’t deserve that either. And who said 'sex-addiction' finds its cure in high-fidelity? Maybe I wanted Pat to be put in that spot, where he is one option among many, for Tiffany. Maybe the right one, but still - an option.

Or maybe it’s just a mood-swing of mine. And maybe I would shed tears of joy watching the film another time, when I’ve taken my meds.

A PHOENIX FROM ITS FLAME

DIRECTED BY DRAKE DOREMUS

STARRING: FELICITY JONES, ANTON YELCHIN, JENNIFER LAWRENCE, CHARLIE BEWLEY, ALEX KINGSTON, OLIVER MUIRHEAD, FINOLA HUGHES, BEN YORK JONES and CHRIS MESSINA

You remember the scene in Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’ (1995) where the couple-by-chance decide not to exchange contact details in a pessimistic move to at least safeguard their encounter, if not give it a chance to succeed, vowing to meet after 6 months of no physical disturbance instead? Well, ‘Like Crazy’ takes the poison. We watch two really young, tactless, heart-on-sleeve romantics torture themselves with shock therapy sessions of pangs and subsequent resuscitation back into their dream and then shoved back on course towards either impending doom or sure-shot monotony that’s drearier than their flower-patterned notebooks and their heart-shaped beds.

Drake Doremus writes and directs this film like a love letter. It’s his own experience, we hear. Semi-autobiographical. That means the names have been changed. And locations, possibly; the rest of the exterior. Even characters, perhaps. Anna (Felicity Jones, with an incredibly endearing performance) tells her Boss at the magazine that she runs errands for that her writing is about someone who’s inspired her a lot and that writing about him is her way of giving something back. Jacob (Anton Yelchin) can only draw pictures of chairs when he puts pen on paper. This film has materialized. I guess that leaves one with no assumptions on who’s who.

But then that’s irrelevant. True that in a film like this, we (the audience) play the sick-in-the-head sort of postman who opens the letters that pass through his hands. Much like how in ‘Blue Valentine’ we played the guilt-ridden neighbour who listens in on next-door fights. We squirm in course of stories as these, however sumptuous. They’re like cholesterol that’s straight out of the stove and piping hot. But these, we find, are legitimized by cinema, the pervert-art. There shall be no check on pleasure, no holds barred. The correspondence is only as juicy as the words communicated with, the sex-tape only as good as the intimacy that’s visible. Empathy works against the viewer, but without it there isn’t really a point. Success lies in how disarming the experience turns out to be, fighting against one’s self-disenchantment. You believe, you feel. You feel, they win.

Jacob and Anna meet at college, like each other, get cozy and get madly attached, all with complete knowledge that Anna will have to leave the country to go back to England, where she’s from. At one instance, Anna overstays her Visa, reluctant to leave Jacob for the summer, an impulsive, immensely mindless decision without which the film wouldn’t have been around. We’re not to ask if the summer compensated in memories for the disaster that it turned out to be. It doesn’t matter. Not to us, not to Doremus. He jump-cuts to the point where Anna’s told she can be in America no more and is ushered back to England with but just a semblance of contact between them and their odd time-zones. Guess they’d just have to be thankful she’s not further from the East.

Anna’s parents are very much involved, Jacob’s mother is merely mentioned. They talk of marriage when Jacob tours England to visit. There are two things that discomfort him at that point. One is the obvious fact that Anna seems to be looking for alternatives. The other is the fact that he has one of his own. Then again, two things still seem to keep the couple hooked with each other, even if in varying degrees. A chair that has ‘Like Crazy’ engraved on the underside and a bracelet that spells ‘Patience’, both gifted to Anna by her woodman lover. As a counter, she throws loads of love and confusion, which, in course of time, morphs into clearer love. Her indulgence is a full-blown storm while his is but a cloudy mess. And they’re raining in different continents. That, in short, is their problem.

Jennifer Lawrence as Samantha (shortened to a tomboyish ‘Sam’) is Jacob’s alternative, before I forget. Although I doubt if anyone can. Both Yelchin and Jones grow in course of the film, Yelchin distinctively uncomfortable with those parts where he’s had to feign an innocence uncharacteristic of both his physical and emotional self. Jones, on the other hand, undergoes a near-perfect transition. Her performance carries the film and the entire weight of Doremus’ intentions, honest or not. With her, he finds his baby in a safe, immensely likeable pair of hands. Lawrence, on her part, contributes with a maturity beyond the ages of both herself and her character. As Roger Ebert would put it, in her we have a very important actress. Of this generation and the ones to come.

Pain turns pleasurable the second time around. The best way to beat it is to remember it; not forget. Doremus would agree. I remember telling a friend about how death takes people who haven’t even come to think of it yet. ‘Like Crazy’ shows a separation equivalent. It’s humble. It’s helpless. It fights fire just to get burned, and it burns in a flame that’s a glorious orange. The flame flickers, but it’s there. I hope you understand. It’s an honest love story with a likeable lead pair. And Jennifer Lawrence. She spikes it further. It works.

I'M SORRY, BUT WHAT ARE YOU AGAIN?

DIRECTED BY JODIE FOSTER 

STARRING: MEL GIBSON, JODIE FOSTER, ANTON YELCHIN, RILEY THOMAS and JENNIFER LAWRENCE

Jodie Foster gets us to call a full-grown man ‘the Beaver’. It's a woman's wish come true. He’s not just any man, he’s her husband and does a Cockney accent. It’s not thinly-veiled, it’s not suggestive. It’s in your face that you’d barely miss it. It’s in an introduction excessively reminiscent of Alexander Payne’s ‘About Schmidt’ (2002) that we are let into this contextually obvious truth – that he’s not called that for no reason, for he is one. I hope you know what I’m talking about, for if you don’t I’d suggest a look-up in the ‘Urban Dictionary’ – you might uncover some interesting details there, details that could help you encapsulate this disenchanting, stone-washed plain-clothe of a film in the palm of your hand. Not that you’d need that, of course. 

There was a time when films literally had to slog to get their premises in. It wasn’t a time too long ago. I’m talking about the Nancy Oliver written ‘Lars and the Real Girl’, which had new-age Cinema’s all-weather man Ryan Gosling talk to a ‘real doll’ to beat his introversion and people found it scandalous. Walter Black (Mel Gibson), here, talks to a Beaver. Of all the nerve, right? Karin and Gus Lindstrom had had a whole lot of explaining to do to the whole of their town before they could legitimize the brother’s condition. Mr. Black gets a shrink-card that he wrote by himself. He’s the CEO of a Toy Manufacturing Firm (he inherits the company from his father and is not qualified for it, self-confessedly) and he finds a Glove-Puppet shaped like a Beaver (the ‘woodchuck’ and not the other one) in the small amount of trash he throws. He’s not a ventriloquist, he just can’t be. His accent's probably the peak point on his CV, so we’re into this job-compromise where he’d speak through the Beaver, but he’d move his lips too. His youngest son Henry is the blonde child who's got nothing to do but play 'cute'. I was struck by how easily he believes in the Beaver, especially when his Dad does such a bad job being one. The wife, Meredith (Jodie Foster) is ‘no questions asked’ before a 'Spiderman' sort of Catch-22, the older son Porter (Anton Yelchin) is quickest with the ‘F’ question. In moments, I felt like asking him one as well. 

Porter has a little life on his own – it’s sort of a back story though for the film is obviously about Big Mr. Black and his Beaver. The lad ghost-writes for people, a process that gets him more than enough of an allowance, as well as the advances of the otherwise-impossible Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), valedictorian and pristine cheerleader who wants him to write her graduation speech, something she’s tried 400-odd times without success. The only thing that’d be harder is tying her shoelaces, but no – she’s got a 4.0 GPA, she’d probably even tie the Escher’s knot if you ask her to. But she can’t write her graduation speech, and that’s because that’s the only thing that Porter can. Convenient? He’s the Beaver’s son, remember?

I’ll tell you again why I referred to ‘Lars and the Real Girl’ in contrast to this film. It’s one that actually tried to nurture its premise to development. ‘the Beaver’ is Foster-bred at best. It’s justified, not felt. I’m surprised at how cinema has taken this less-than-favourable stance towards sincerity these days, what with efforts everywhere else. The casting in this film, for instance. Mel Gibson, who's just had to stiffen a wee bit more to fit his role like the puppet on his hand. Jodie Foster who’s played Clarice Starling like, a million years ago. Anton Yelchin, this studio kid in Hollywood that’s in every second teenage film that pokes its head out. Jennifer Lawrence, dear Jennifer Lawrence who was a said disappointment having face-lifted her ‘Winter’s Bone’ with X-Woman Mystique. Wait till you watch her in this film. 

This is a film where I was surprised that the people who made it and were in it could take it seriously. I couldn’t. Somewhere along the drawing board, someone drew a Beaver on the Glove-Puppet and someone liked it. Possibly Ms. Foster herself. And I had to watch the film to know it was a bad idea.