Grade: A-

Bi-polar disorder is something that is never really handled well in story-telling. It’s either played for laughs or makes the afflicted person such a crazy, bat-shit mess that it’s hard to root for them and even harder to understand why the characters around them tolerate their bag-shittiness. Silver Linings Playbook does it better, in fact I daresay it gets it right. Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is mostly a good and nice man, however he has no filter from his thoughts to his speech and he’s prone to explosions of extreme rage and violence. All the while he maintains a tragically positive attitude towards life and believes that if he just tries hard enough he will get a happy ending, a silver lining if you will. The result of this is a tragic and darkly funny movie that has earned the mostly positive reviews it’s getting.

Pat’s just getting released from a mental hospital after serving a court ordered eight months there, and is ready to get his ex-wife back. This proves difficult because she has a restraining order on him for beating her lover half to death after he catches them in the shower together. Pat has a support group, his father Pat Senior (Robert Deniro) who suffers from a pretty intense bout of OCD that centers around the Philadelphia Eagles, his mother Dolores (the unsung hero of this movie Jacki Weaver) and a supporting cast of character actors that add life to the film. Nobody can quite get through to him that his wife, Nicki, has moved on and wants nothing to do with him and that maybe they weren’t really right for each other in the first place anyway. Pat doesn’t want to hear any of this and reacts very poorly when it’s even mildly suggested, like when he becomes consumed with rage and becomes a danger to his parents because he can’t find his wedding video.

Cue the hot girl. Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) is a recent widow, sex-addict and might have a spot of bi-polar herself. Tiffany shows up and is introduced to Pat through mutual friends because they probably figure it would be easiest to just pawn off the two crazies on each other. The movie then pretends it’s not a romance even though we’re well aware that it is, and the climax revolves around a big dance scene and the result of the big football game, finally resolving itself in a somewhat easy manner. But more to that in a second.

The acting is what drives this film. Cooper, Lawrence, Deniro and Weaver are all outstanding. All the major roles received Oscar nominations and all deservedly so. I wrote about a week ago about Deniro in Being Flynn and how he just doesn’t seem to play an unhinged character all that well anymore, and in this he finds the right role for himself at this stage. In fact, he’s a man so hinged that anything disrupting it causes complete chaos. Deniro proves that I was wrong about him and he’s still got the goods when given a script that works. Jennifer Lawrence plays a quietly haunted character perfectly, though she’s less good during her big explosions. Cooper finds just the right note of a bi-polar man, not crazy, just struggling to maintain his composure and adjust himself to a world with too much stress for him to handle. Jacki Weaver is awesome in this movie. I’m incredibly happy she got a nomination, and I hope she wins. Hers is a thankless role, the long suffering mother. She’s endlessly nice, but has a son with bi-polar and a husband with OCD. She loves them both and is clearly holding on to her composure by the skin of her teeth. Weaver’s performance is the emotional center of this film in my eyes.

Now let’s get to the ending. I didn’t love it. This movie was great because it didn’t try to deny that the problems the characters faced were complicated. It feels honest and it doesn’t mess with the audience’s head just to get a cheap emotional point. But then the ending feels a little coy, and employs a ton of clichés, some of which to be honest I’m okay with because they used them in new and refreshing ways, and makes this otherwise very complicated situation resolve itself a little too easily. The final few minutes, while satisfying in a way, just doesn’t resonate as well as I would hope. It’s a minor gripe, but it prevents Silver Linings Playbook from being a borderline masterpiece.

Grade: B-

Few actors can go unhinged like Robert Deniro. He can terrify us with nothing more than a look. It was never the violence of his movies that unnerved the audience, it was the glint in his eye like he was enjoying himself on a level we’d never fully understand. Deniro characters were people we want desperately not to exist, because the alternative is too terrifying to face. That’s why people often refer to him as one of the greatest actors, if not the greatest, of his generation, or any generation. The problem is, and this is no surprise to anyone who’s watched movies for the last 15 years or so, that Deniro, that dark mirror into our world, has seemed to disappear. He’s been replaced by a loveable spoof of the tough-guy gangster. Oh, he intimates Ben Stiller just fine in Meet the Parents, but he never intimates us, because the character is a cartoon, a ridiculous concoction created only for laughs. He’s an enjoyable presence to watch on screen, but that’s the problem, I don’t want to have an enjoyable experience with a Deniro movie. I want to be uncomfortable, nervous and worried about what insane thing he’s going to do next. I think the problem is that the self-parodying, caricature Deniro has now replaced the dangerous actor he used to be. When we see him on screen, we expect him to do his Deniro schtick with his faux-tough guy talk and self-aware smile.

I once dressed up like this for Halloween. I did not intimidate anybody.

In Being Flynn Deniro is attempting to find that old Scorcese-starring rage-filled method actor. And he doesn’t do an awful job either. Any other actor giving the same performance, I would probably just say “that was pretty good” and be done with it. But seeing Deniro try to go for the subtly unstable, unpredictable and dangerous character, and coming up short is jarring. In fact, he goes a bit over the top in a lot of scenes, choosing to yell his way through vulgar, racist and homophobic monologues, rather than letting that anger fester within him until it bubbles to the surface. There’s little danger to his character, just the standard crazy, delusional stuff. Crazy’s not what we want though, crazy’s boring. We want to be scared of Deniro again, but it seems to be getting clearer and clearer that he just might not have it in him anymore.

Deniro just remembered Rocky and Bulwinkle

I didn’t hate this movie though. There were redeeming qualities, Julianne Moore’s performance comes to mind, as the depressed, ever suffering mother. Paul Dano is steady, though doesn’t dig quite deep enough for my tastes. And Deniro, despite the above criticism, did have a couple of inspired moments.

The movie is based off the book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by, you guessed it, Nick Flynn. I haven’t read the book myself, but all accounts it’s awesome and worth a read. The story follows Nick, estranged from his father his entire life, who’s drifting along, dealing with drug addiction and daddy issues. He gets a job at a homeless shelter where his father, recently kicked out of his apartment and cab because of his drinking and craziness, shows up. They’re both aspiring writers and Nick fears he will end up just like his father. A lesser movie would aim for a redemption ending or at least give us some sense of finality, but Being Flynn, to its credit, isn’t interested in either of those things. Sure, Nick seems to have a lot figured out, too much in fact but back to that in a second, but his father is stuck permanently in a static state, forever believing that Viking is ready to publish his novel. Nick’s story isn’t quite earned. He gets addicted to cocaine too easily, then gets off it too easily, then seems to launch a successful writing career much too easily (trust me, it’s fucking hard). Everything just seems to happen to him and I never got the feeling he was actually working toward anything. The most interesting plot in this movie is the bits and pieces of Julianne Moore’s character, the big reveal of her death and the way it’s played. It might come off a bit like melodrama, but in my mind it works. She is the film’s emotional center and probably could’ve been used even more while scaling back Deniro’s performance a bit.

This movie wasn’t a total failure, in fact it was pretty good. But it had the opportunity to be something more and it came up short. This is the kind of movie I would rather be awful than pretty good. I don’t know if that makes sense, but the worst thing I can say about a movie starring an unhinged Robert Deniro is that I’ll most likely forget it in a couple months.