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. 

Memory unbound: the return of The Unfortunates

How do you tell a story? Be honest now. I don’t mean one you’ve thoroughly digested and developed, rehearsed and repeated and polished into a comfortable, familiar routine. I’m talking about the stories that leave residue in dim, neglected corners of your mind, that come to you in shards, associative, suggesting one thread and then another, driven by unpredictable emotional currents and the caprices of memory. Experience lies before us as a palimpsest. The traces of one moment hover within the traces of others. It’s perfectly sensible that when we tell our stories we try to impose order, through chronology, through causality. But art isn’t always sensible.

“But I know this city!” A man, our unnamed narrator, arrives in an unnamed English city to report on a soccer match. He’s a novelist, but he works as a sportswriter to pay the bills. He arrives, and his recognition of the city is accompanied by waves of memories, most of them about a dear, dead friend named Tony he needs still to remember, some of them about a woman he’s trying to forget. He strolls and looks around, he eats, he works, he departs on the evening train back to London. All the while those memories emerge of their own volition, some startlingly clear, some hazy, and dribbling forth. That’s the gist of The Unfortunates, yet it hardly conveys a sense of how this warm, melancholy, emotionally frank novel unfolds.


The sportswriter/novelist is actually B.S. Johnson, the friend Tony Tillinghast, a young academic who died of cancer. The Unfortunates, in keeping with Johnson’s personal credo regarding the imperative of truth in the modern novel, is basically what we can fairly call a memoir. But it’s a memoir in a box. First published in 1969, The Unfortunates is comprised of 27 unbound chapters, each ranging from one to a dozen pages. The first and last of these chapters are clearly marked as such, the rest are to be sequenced by the reader in whatever random order catches their fancy. The structure is not dissimilar to that of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which was first published in English only a few years previous, yet while Cortázar’s ingenious method of encouraging readers to “hop” through the text via a number of prescribed patterns provides a beguiling sense of immersing oneself into a particular world, Johnson’s approach is starker, and more tactile. Beautifully reprinted by New Directions ($31), with an invaluable introductory essay by novelist and Johnson biographer Jonathan Coe, The Unfortunates allows us a peculiar feeling of discovery. Opening the box and shuffling through the pages reminds me most of finding an old box of photos. First one catches your eye, then another. One you recognize, one you don’t. You see someone in one photo and then see them in another. Was that before or after? Where were they? Where was I when this was taken? Somewhere in all this is a story, but the story changes a little every time you try to reconstruct it.

Johnson was an outspoken disciple of Sterne, Joyce and Beckett—who offered a rare public endorsement of Johnson in return. He fiercely believed that the novel was irrelevant unless it pursued new forms and eschewed the entire notion of being fiction at all. To cast doubts upon the integrity and durability of Johnson’s strident literary polemic is perfectly reasonable. Fortunately, Johnson’s investment in formal strategies—a previous novel featured holes cut into the pages—were equaled if not bettered by the sheer eloquence of his prose, which, as it turns out, is actually pretty accessible. The form of The Unfortunates is in poetic alignment to its content. The tone of the narrator’s experience is matched by the randomness of his story’s delivery. Continuity is an illusion Johnson is unwilling to impose—it contradicts what for him most closely approximates emotional truth. It’s worth noting that in his introduction Coe speculates that Johnson’s unpopularity amongst contemporaneous literary circles may have had more to do with the confessional quality of his novels than with their innovative devices. They were far too vulnerable for the tastes of the moment.

“The waves of the past batter at the sea defenses of my sandy sanity, need to be safely pictured, still, romanticized, prettified.” “Visits run together, the trivial with the important, our life with his dying.” “I try to invest anything connected with him now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected to him.” Grief bleeds into the quotidian over and over in The Unfortunates. Commas proliferate, as though the narrator is trying not to digress to deeply into any number of blind alleys, but rather keep rippling forward. Strange gaps appear in the text as though whited-out, as though our narrator draws a blank, his pause present on the page as a finger of empty space. But the prose is free of abstraction, preferring to focus on the concrete, to offer a cascade of vivid details: Tony and the narrator posing for a photo, squinting in the sunlight, on the front lawn of Tony’s new house in a still-unfinished estate, a dying man set against a landscape of the brand new; numerous meals eaten in numerous places; a rented room where our narrator and Wendy—that woman who “ruined love” for years after—negotiated their lovemaking; a cemetery where the gravestones are marked only with numbers, or was it initials?; a friend of Tony’s who hung himself in his home, leaving carefully rendered diagrams of his suicide techniques for his wife to discover.

Johnson took his own life only four years after the publication of The Unfortunates, the fourth of his seven novels. He was 40, and reportedly in despair over his commercial failures and familial strife. I might suggest that this tragically early demise speaks to the perils of artistic convictions of the sort Johnson held so dear, but that feels pretty trite. Generalizations are a form of lying, so writes Johnson in the last chapter of The Unfortunates, so let’s just presume what drove the author to death was complicated and can only be sought in the details of his experience, the sort of details so lucidly evoked in this book, which with any luck will continue to find the audience Johnson so coveted.

Backflipping to a theatre near you

Ready? Okay. Two horny jocks ditch football practice to go to cheerleader camp and fish in a sea of chicks. Has this been done before or does it just feel that way? I confess to an unwillingness to do the research necessary to answer this question, and in any case Fired Up! is hardly concerned with innovation, save perhaps the ushering of male characters to the forefront of what might be deemed the cheerleader comedy sub-subgenre, one that’s now officially gone meta: the movie features a scene where all 300-plus of the participants in hot pants attend an open-air screening of the proto-pom-pom-com Bring It On and chant along with every line of dialogue.

The first scenes of Fired Up! raise provocative questions. Why do these high school seniors look old enough for doctorates? Who is this mysterious screenwriter with the suspicious moniker of “Freedom Jones”? Shouldn’t Philip Baker Hall get a new agent? Could they, ie: “Freedom Jones,” not think of a better running gag for Baker Hall’s Coach Byrnes than having him say “shit” a lot? And, with all due respect to the great PBH, isn’t 77 a little old for a football coach? More pertinently, is it just me showing my age, or do each of the stars of Fired Up! not seem eerily modeled after older famous actors? There’s the new Ralph Macchio, the junior Kate Hudson, and this strange, troubling hybrid of Owen Wilson and Jim Carrey. Where do they breed these kids? What do they feed them?

Such questions do not distract for long however, because Fired Up! is actually fairly diverting. Seriously. Director Will Gluck displays no special finesse with the camera—unless you’re deeply impressed by spiraling crane shots that allow us to take in a maximum number of teenage tits in tight tops without cutting—but between Mr./Ms. “Jones” and the admirably game leads the dialogue often zips quite nicely. An affection for screwball comedy can be felt in these rapid-fire gags and goofball non-sequiturs. Especially in the second act, things move along very fast, and I laughed. Not one bit of the plotting felt even slightly inspired, but the repartee helped the robotic story breeze along. So perhaps it’s safest to call Fired Up! an above average teen sex comedy, which still makes it a fundementally mediocre movie, but of a sort that you can’t really feel too depressed over. I have to defer to Manohla Dargis, who pretty nailed it in her New York Times review: “kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb.”

TIFF '08: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden on Sugar, faith, language, ambition and collaboration

Half Nelson was among the most preternaturally assured indie debuts of the past decade, perhaps more so given that its singularity was the product of two fully engaged writer/directors, a rare phenomena without significant counterparts in contemporary American movies outside of the brothers Coen. It no doubt of some significance that Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are a couple—and I can’t decide if that makes collaboration easier or more difficult. But Sugar, their follow-up to Half Nelson, is in some regards even more stylistically and tonally distinctive than its predecessor. It follows the titular Dominican pitcher (vividly embodied by first-timer Algenis Perez Soto) as he journeys from Boca Chica to play in the minors in an Indiana town. It eschews the customary ascent-to-triumph tactics of the sports genre for something far richer and more attuned to the vagaries of immigrant experience. I spoke with Fleck and Boden after Sugar’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

JB: Where the idea for Sugar came from?

Ryan Fleck: I’d read an article somewhere about a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic and eventually discovered that every major league baseball team has an academy there, where they sign players for a fraction of what they sign them for when graduating high school or college in the US. We became very interested in the kids who go through these programs, especially the ones you don’t hear about. We started our research up in the Bronx at that field that ends the movie where there’s this whole community of guys who’ve been through these programs and eventually, when they’re let go or decide to leave early, head to New York to start over.

Anna Boden: Then we went down the Dominican Republic, interviewing guys, tooling around, going to as many academies as possible, going into towns and finding players who’d been released or had gone to the US. The character of Sugar and his journey is a composite of all the different stories we heard and people we met during that time.

JB: Do either of you have friends or family with analogous experiences as immigrants?

RF: Not in our lifetimes. Maybe three generations ago.

AB: This didn’t come from that sort of personal place. We just saw this story as a vessel to explore themes we were interested in: what it means to have an American dream, then have that dream shift, to rediscover who you are, how you might fit within this system.

JB: The film handles its politics in a lovely, understated way. One subject that I thought was dealt with especially elegantly was heartland religion. There’s seems to be strong undercurrent in this Indiana town where Sugar finds himself of people wanting to wed every part of their lives to their sense of belonging to a religious community. I wonder if you felt at all anxious about dealing with this subject.


RF: We’re both very non-religious, so we kind of surprised ourselves with this gentle portrayal of these religious families. I guess it’s just that when you’re trying to tell an honest story you have to listen to what’s happening around you. All through our research we kept encountering religion—most players thank God numerous times when talking about their talent—so we knew we had to work it into our movie in a way that felt organic.

AB: We were as surprised as anyone at just how much of a spiritual journey we were telling.

JB: I actually found myself wondering if there wasn’t some spiritual, or rather mythic corollary to Sugar’s story. I understand Spanish, and found it interesting that you subtitle virtually all the Spanish dialogue in the movie with one notable exception, this Icarus-like story Sugar shares about how he got his scar as a baby, trying to grasp something beyond his reach. And of course he has this considerable hubris, this arrogance to match his talent, so the story naturally assumes allegorical dimensions.

RF: That scene was written later in the process, simply because we realized we cast somebody who has a scar. That’s Algenis telling the actual story of how he got it. What you’re saying is really interesting. Honestly, I never made that connection.

AB: I did.

RF: Really?

AB: I thought it was really important. And for me the decision to not translate it was about not necessarily having the audience make that connection—though I think it’s really lovely that you did—but rather letting this guy who’s been stuck in this place where he can’t communicate for so long finally be able to speak his own language, seeing how that changes who he is, how the process of coming to this place has changed him.

RF: Plus, it puts you in his shoes for a second, giving you some idea of what it’s like to have all these people talking and understanding almost nothing.

JB: I love how this story of self-actualization coincides with one of language acquisition—so much of how we identify ourselves has to do with the minutia of how self-expression. I also thought that Algenis, who I guess spoke more English than the character, did a knockout job of playing a guy who understands very little.

AB: I think Algenis shared a lot with the character. He understood this feeling of having to smile and nod your head a lot to get through uncomfortable scenarios.

JB: Your films possess such a distinctive style considering your sharing of writing and directing duties. Do you have a process in which you have to delegate certain elements of the work?

RF: We’ve used the same key crew both times, and when you’re working with the same people they contribute to the same part of that vision. But between us it’s actually pretty fluid. We pretty much do everything together.

JB: So often in movies the more voices you have competing for control the more fights that arise and the more diluted a distinctive voice can become.

AB: Yet it’s so much easier to fight those fights when you have a partner fighting alongside you. Making Sugar we actually felt pretty supported by our team and our producers, but with Half Nelson we hadn’t worked with any of these people before and they didn’t have the confidence in us they have now. So I found it incredibly helpful to have someone there who I knew trusted me and who could give unwavering support and who could help to decide which fights are worth having.

JB: Were there films you guys used as models of some sort or that you could use as a shorthand with others when trying to pitch the film or get your team on board?

AB: I remember we showed Algenis Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

JB: Not for a sense of the style of your filmmaking, I presume.

RF: Mostly just because they’re good movies and we wanted to share some of our favourites with him.

AB: And some of the best acting ever.

RF: There wasn’t really any one film that guided us, though, really, We watched all the baseball movies ever made, just to see how they shot it, as sort of a technical exercise.

JB: You were speaking at the screening last night about how one of the things that attracted you to Sugar was that it was a story you’d never heard, so I wonder if you have plans for a next project with a similar appeal.

RF: We’re been adapting a book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessi, which has some similar twists. But having these sorts of twists originate in someone else's material will be a good way of keeping us on our toes.