Silver Linings Playbook Review

The first hour is genuinely uncomfortable in the right way. Russell keeps the camera close and moving, the Philadelphia house is loud with people talking over each other, and Bradley Cooper plays Pat as a man whose certainty is a symptom, chasing his wife with a conviction the film refuses to romanticize. Jennifer Lawrence, barely into her twenties and playing a widow, is astonishing, blunt and unembarrassed and clearly the most stable person on screen.

Robert De Niro does his best work in twenty years as a father whose superstitions are the same illness in a socially acceptable costume, and the scene where he admits he was not there is the finest thing in the film. Then the structure arrives. A dance competition, a wager and a score to beat convert a portrait of two damaged people into a machine that must produce a happy ending, and the last half hour is a romantic comedy wearing the earlier film's clothes. The performances survive it. The argument does not, and the cheerful conclusion about love as treatment is worth being suspicious of.