Summer of Netflix Day 34 - Silver Linings Playbook

Alexa:  I loved Silver Linings Playbook when I first saw it back in 2012, but I could see it being a movie that wouldn’t hold up as well for me the second time around. Fortunately, I found the repeat viewing just as endearing. The tone of Silver Linings Playbook is complicated, jumping back and forth from charming romantic comedy to angst-ridden drama to somewhere in between, but somehow it works, thanks in large part to director/screenwriter David O. Russell’s deft handling of the material and a singularly talented cast. (However, as exceptional as Jennifer Lawrence is in this film, I still stand by my opinion that Jessica Chastain deserved the Best Actress trophy that year.) At its core, Silver Linings Playbook is about some damaged people coming to terms with their turbulent pasts and looking hopefully if tentatively toward the future, and how their relationships shape them in the best and worst of times. Early on in the film, Bradley Cooper’s character, after chucking Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms out the window, laments that life is hard enough as it is, so why did Hemingway have to go and write a downer of an ending when sometimes people just need a little happiness? That attitude lingers throughout the movie, which doesn’t downplay the characters’ struggles with mental illness, but at the same time refuses to shy away from humor and heart.

Joel: Sorry guys, this movie just didn’t work for me. Clearly, based on the heaps of praise that everyone else in the world has given this movie, I’m the one that’s missing something here. It’s not even that I despise or even really dislike the movie with any amount of real passion. It just wasn’t that strong of a movie. You can hide a lot of a bland script by covering it up with good acting and that’s in play here. What good can be said of the movie rest solely on the shoulders of the actors who do a pretty admirable job with the material they’re given here. But at the end of the day, it just felt like a pretty harmless, but unremarkable, forgettable movie. And sometimes unremarkable, forgettable movies are fine, that’s was discount bins and daytime cable television are for. But this cast and crew should be making something better than middle of the road. They have all proven capable in other movies. If you like Silver Linings Playbook that’s fine. I didn’t hate it enough for us to really be on opposite sides of the issue but at the end of the day, the movie never quite clicked for me.

Chris: I do enjoy this movie, it’s a big showcase of the chemistry between Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper that David O. Russell puts on display a little too often (we get it, we’ve enjoyed it a few times, cast somebody else). And as much as I enjoyed it, I still don’t think it was a good enough performance to earned Lawrence an Oscar win and felt like she got it because there wasn’t exactly a stand-out performance among the nominees that year. Don’t get me wrong, Lawrence seems like the type of actress that would’ve won an Oscar at some point in her career, no doubt, but that year just didn’t seem like the right year. All-in-all, this movie shows that we’re all capable of being moody pricks when things get rough and sometimes having somebody else going through crap with you can start the road to recovery with a little bit more ease.

Your Viewing Homework for Tomorrow: Batman