“Watch for the signs,” the tagline for Silver Linings Playbook reads. The film earns that warning. David O. Russell wrote and directed this 2012 romantic drama, adapting Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel The Silver Linings Playbook, and it moves like a picture that knows exactly how much it can get away with.
Trailer, via eOnefilms.
Pat Solatano Comes Home to Upper Darby
Bradley Cooper plays Patrizio “Pat” Solitano Jr., a former teacher with bipolar disorder who leaves an eight-month stay at a psychiatric hospital in Baltimore and moves back into his childhood home in Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania. His father, Patrizio Sr., is played by Robert De Niro. His mother, Dolores, is played by Jacki Weaver.
Pat’s goal is simple and impossible: win back his ex-wife, Nikki. She has moved away and taken out a restraining order against him. He found her in the shower with another man and badly beat him. That fact sits under every scene, and Russell never lets the audience forget it.
Anupam Kher plays Dr. Cliff Patel, Pat’s therapist, who pushes him to stay on his medication. A repeat of the violent outbursts could send Pat back to Baltimore. Pat tells him he has a new outlook: he tries to see the good, or silver lining, in everything he experiences.
He does not always manage it.
Tiffany Maxwell and the Dance Competition
At dinner at his best friend Ronnie’s house, Pat meets Ronnie’s sister-in-law, Tiffany Maxwell, a young widow played by Jennifer Lawrence. She has an unnamed disorder. The two talk about the psychiatric medications they have taken. She offers him casual sex. He turns her down. He is focused on Nikki.
Then Tiffany makes her offer. She will deliver a letter to Nikki if Pat partners with her in an upcoming dance competition. Pat agrees, convinced that helping Tiffany will show Nikki he has changed and has developed sensitivity to others. Over the following weeks, they practice.
The film’s structure is a bargain, and Russell knows it. Two people with real damage make a deal that neither can fully control. The training scenes carry the romance, but the deal carries the tension.
Patrizio Sr., Bookmaking and the Eagles
De Niro’s Patrizio Sr. wants to open a restaurant. To fund it, he has turned to illegal bookmaking. He has bet most of his money on a Philadelphia Eagles game, and he asks Pat to attend for good luck, believing his son’s attention brings the team fortune.
That belief is irrational. The film treats it as real anyway. De Niro plays the obsession straight, and the result is a father who is as unwell as his son in a different register. The Eagles are not a hobby in this house. They are a system of faith.
Silver Linings Playbook premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2012. The Weinstein Company released it in the United States on November 16, 2012.
Casting Shifts That Shaped the Film
The cast almost looked nothing like this. Russell first intended to make the film with Vince Vaughn and Zooey Deschanel, but instead went on to make The Fighter. Mark Wahlberg was set to work with Russell a fourth time but dropped out after production delays created a scheduling conflict.
Russell had planned to work with Cooper on an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He had been impressed by Cooper in Wedding Crashers (2005), citing his “good bad-guy energy” and unpredictability. Cooper told Russell “he had been heavier and angrier and more fearful” at the time of that performance and had drawn on those feelings for it. Russell was excited that Cooper would bring those qualities to Pat.
Anne Hathaway was cast as Tiffany. She dropped out over scheduling conflicts with The Dark Knight Rises and creative differences with Russell. Elizabeth Banks, Kirsten Dunst, Angelina Jolie, Blake Lively, Rooney Mara, Rachel McAdams, Andrea Riseborough and Olivia Wilde were also considered.
Russell initially thought Lawrence, 21 at the time of filming, was too young to play opposite Cooper, 37. Her audition changed his mind. He said the “expressiveness in her eyes and in her face” was “ageless.” He compares Lawrence to Tiffany, describing her as confident but one of the least neurotic people he knows, with the confidence and glimpses of vulnerability the part needed.
Tiffany went through several versions. She was initially meant to be goth. Lawrence dyed her hair black and did test shoots in heavy goth makeup. Weinstein disapproved.
What the Film Does With Its Running Time
Silver Linings Playbook runs 122 minutes. It is a drama, a comedy and a romance at once, and the genre mixing is the point rather than a flaw. The anxiety attacks arrive without warning. Some are triggered by hearing “My Cherie Amour” by Stevie Wonder. Other times Pat imagines hearing the song during an attack.
That detail is the film’s best piece of engineering. A love song becomes a trigger. Stevie Wonder becomes a symptom. Russell builds the whole movie on that kind of reversal, where the thing that should comfort a person is the thing that breaks him.
The supporting cast is deep. Chris Tucker plays Danny McDaniels. Julia Stiles plays Veronica. Shea Whigham plays Jake Solatano. John Ortiz plays Ronnie. Paul Herman plays Randy. Dash Mihok plays Officer Keogh. Matthew Russell plays Ricky D’Angelo.
Awards and Box Office
The film opened to critical acclaim, with praise for Russell’s direction and screenplay and for the performances of Cooper and Lawrence. It grossed $236.4 million worldwide.
It received eight nominations at the 85th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Lawrence won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Release Schedule
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| September 8, 2012 | Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival |
| November 16, 2012 | United States release by The Weinstein Company |
Why the Ending Still Lands
Silver Linings Playbook works because it refuses to separate its comedy from its illness. Pat’s silver-lining outlook is not a cure and the film never sells it as one. It is a coping mechanism, and Russell shows both what it costs and what it buys.
Cooper’s performance is the anchor. He plays Pat as a man who is charming and frightening in the same minute, and the film does not ask the audience to pick one. Lawrence matches him. Tiffany is not a manic pixie who fixes a broken man. She is a widow with her own disorder who makes a transaction and then cannot keep it a transaction.
The weak spot is the dance competition itself. It is a device, and the film leans on it harder than the premise needs. But the device gets Pat and Tiffany into the same room for weeks, and those weeks are the movie.
De Niro’s Patrizio Sr. is the performance that has aged best. A father who bets on football and believes his son is a lucky charm is a joke until he is not. Russell plays it as both.
The film’s reputation has held for over a decade because it treats mental illness as ordinary material rather than a spectacle. Pat takes medication. Tiffany has a disorder the film never names. Neither is fixed by love. They are managed, badly and then better.
That is a rarer thing in a studio romance than it should be. Silver Linings Playbook is not a film about recovery. It is a film about two people choosing to keep going in the same direction.
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