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For the next few days, I’ll help you blunt the January blues with movies that give off positive vibes about new beginnings and fresh starts.
Today: 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which Bradley Cooper has just left an eight-month stint in a psychiatric hospital and is trying to rebuild his life. His relentless, almost frenzied positivity — he sees “silver linings” everywhere — plays a little bit like a sendup of self-help claptrap, and his twitchy relationship with Jennifer Lawrence as his widowed neighbor plays like a gentle sendup of romantic comedies.
This is a not a feel-good movie about the Hollywoodized “power” of mental illness to help us see the world in a different way. Director David O. Russell leans hard into the itchy and disquieting aspects of how we’re all being driven a little bit crazy by life’s pressures, how we’re all just barely holding our shit together, if we are. But there’s a lot of humor here, too, about how starting over is hard.
With all the awards buzz Cooper is getting for his performance in Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, it’s worth remembering that he’s always been an extraordinary actor: his work here is exhaustingly rewarding. Lawrence is as astonishing as she always is, in what was her first grownup role; the terrific cast also includes Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro as Cooper’s parents.
US: stream on Netflix; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Silver Linings Playbook at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
