Let's go crazy

Does love actually make you crazy, or is it really the other way around? Mental illness has been the psychic engine of some more convincing modern romantic comedies—see Punch-Drunk Love (2002)—perhaps because it places an obstacle between lovers and coital consummation where, in a post-sexual revolution universe, there might otherwise not be. That’s certainly the case with the tweaking twosome in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which a manic schoolteacher (Bradley Cooper) newly released from a state hospital—where he was placed after nearly beating his wife’s lover to death— meets a young cop’s widow (Jennifer Lawrence) with impulse control issues who’s been flirting with nymphomania. He’s adopted a program of blind optimism and is obsessed with reuniting with his estranged spouse; she’s focusing her ferocious energies on preparing for a dance contest. Given that’s he the subject of a restraining order, he needs a secret marriage-mending go-between; given that the sort of dance she has in mind generally works better with two people, she needs a partner. So they make a deal, go out on Halloween Raisin Bran-and-tea dates, crazy shit happens, more crazy people enter the picture, bumpity-bum-bum, da-ta-da-ta-da. 

But when I say “crazy,” I don’t mean crazy-crazy, like real-life crazy, but rather that special we’re-in-a-crazy-movie kind of crazy that allows for ids to run rabid in the name of controlled comic chaos; not the sort of crazy that leads to tragedy, despair or, in the case of John Cassavetes’ movies, that most fragile, unnerving, eerily exhilarating sort of equilibrium. The characters in Silver Linings Playbook, based on Matthew Quick’s eponymous novel, are only as crazy as they need to be to keep the story’s central conceits afloat for the film’s duration; as we near resolution, the craziness is fully contained. Near the top of the film our protagonist chucks a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls through a window—not out, but through it—from frenzied disgust for its scandalizing, downbeat finale. He demands happy endings from his stories, and we know that come hell or high water—or in this case, flagrant, flailing dance floor amateurism and football triumph—he’s going to get one. So yes, under its batshit guise of high neurosis, this is deceptively close to being a perfectly conventional rom-com. 

And so what? The big picture feels a bit pedestrian, but scene-by-scene Silver Linings Playbook is giddily inspired. Cooper’s nothing if not committed, a little scary, a lot talky, running around his parents neighbourhood with a trash bag over his torso so he can sweat better. Lawrence brings nothing but wild conviction and drive to her secondary role. She’s got feral Medusa stares, is seductive in a way that makes you want to remove sharp objects from the house when she comes over for dinner. And the supporting cast populates Russell’s suburban Philadelphia milieu with memorable, distinctive neuroses of their own, most especially Robert De Niro, terrific as Cooper’s OCD bookie dad, who’s insanely superstitious about sports. Russell’s movies run on anxiety, urgency and carefully tuned babble, and everyone gets some great dialogue. The final scenes kind of blow it, the dance-off most of all, since it keeps cutting away to reaction shots to remind us how we’re supposed to feel. But whatever, if you don’t have a good time with Silver Linings Playbook, you’re nuts. 

Crazy in love

After helming a pair of lengthy, ambitious ensemble dramas—the beloved Boogie Nights (1997) and the more divisive Magnolia (1999)—Paul Thomas Anderson, already a seasoned director in his early 30s, reclaimed the long-neglected romantic comedy for filmgoers who actually value things like invention, audacity and risk—traits common to the genre in its 1940s heyday—with Punch-Drunk Love (2002). The gamble paid-off among critics and cinephiles at least, winning Anderson Best Director at Cannes and winning Adam Sandler the grudging admiration of viewers who couldn’t stand most of his other movies. (A similar trick was pulled off with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004], an even more inventive, more resonant film about love and its unnerving proximity to mental illness, in which Jim Carrey gave a rare emotionally textured performance—which is to say he wasn’t totally unbearable for anyone over the age of eight.) Sadly, the film failed to recoup its hefty $25-million dollar budget, but then Anderson’s models seem more aligned to silent comedies, certain MGM musicals or A Perfect Couple (1979), Robert Altman’s woefully underrated stab at the genre, than to contemporary box office-behemoth schmaltz like, say, You’ve Got Mail (1998). 

Sandler’s Barry Egan has seven emasculating sisters, a small business wholesaling novelty toilet supplies, and one painfully blue, not very flattering suit, which he wears through the entirety of Punch-Drunk Love and which must smell really, really bad by the end, given that Barry travels from California to Hawaii and Utah and generally gets nervous and runs around a lot. Barry also obsesses over special retail offers, suffers devastating levels of depression and/or anxiety, exhibits violent tendencies and is socially awkward in the extreme—in several regards, Barry’s not so different from Freddie Quell, the protagonist of Anderson’s far more somber The Master (2012). If Anderson’s highly focused, minimally cut, deliberately jarring direction didn’t encourage us to laugh or marvel at Barry’s unbridled distress, we’d be really worried about the guy. But Punch-Drunk Love is true to the rom-com’s promise of unlikely redemption, sending Barry an angel in the form of Emily Watson, an attractive, patient, quietly peculiar woman who not only fancies Barry but seems to fancy him precisely because he’s a fucking maniac—there’s a memorable scene that finds the lovers exchanging whispered sweet nothings that describe grotesque violence, a scene that may have inspired a similar motif in Take This Waltz (2011). Given the nature of her more recent work, it’s great to see Watson in a role that allows her to be sexy and mysterious. Unfortunately, I think the film’s one significant flaw may be her character’s lack of development. I get that Anderson wanted to make Punch-Drunk Love as fleet as possible, and to keep Barry firmly at the centre, but I believe that Barry’s pathos would have been only strengthened by a deeper sense of what sort of woman could so easily fall in love with him.

Anyway, Punch-Drunk Love is a very special, and very, very funny, genuinely nutty film. It also features a wonderful supporting turn from one of my favourite contemporary character actors, Luis Guzmán. Now it only somebody would make him the lead in a romantic comedy!