Thursday, December 27, 2012

Interesting Reviews on Silver Linings Playbook

     I have this problem as a person who likes movies, where I get really self-conscious about my preferences very quickly. If someone disagrees with me on a film, especially someone who actually knows what they are talking about and is not an eighteen year-old little kid who can barely put her opinions on the internet without dissolving into a puddle of nerves, I honestly get very insecure very quickly. Especially because talking about movies is something that I really like to do... I kind of want to make it my career one day. Idiotic and overly-ambitious as that feels to me. I could never!

     Therefore, I generally try to avoid other reviews of films in general. Because if that person's opinion differs from mine, I get anxiety. This is not the time or place to talk about my strange in-between anxiety where it's worse than the average person's but not bad enough to actual seek some help with it (or maybe it is, considering the film in question is about mental illness?! To be clear, I didn't realize I had brought up my own mental skews within a post about mental skews until I was revising it...), but just know, I really don't want to read about negative reviews regarding Silver Linings Playbook. This is due to the fact that I liked and have already recommended it to a few friends... But here's the thing: I don't know very much about mental illness. I do not have a mental illness. No one really close to me in my personal life suffers from a mental illness to the degree addressed in this movie. And, shameful as it is to admit, every time I have been confronted with a problem revolving around mental illness, I have no idea what to do and surrender that person to someone who can help them more than I. I'm a useless friend when it comes down to it, and somehow that leads me to this conclusion: I think it's worth reading a lot of different reviews on Silver Linings Playbook. So I tried my best to find some gems through the Google search bar, and here lie my findings.

Let's play Pro-Con-Con-Pro. I'll start with a positive review, follow with two critiques, and to end on a positive note, we'll examine another instance in which the reviewer has some nice things to say.

( Top Photo from FanPop.com)

     My favorite positive review I've read so far about this film is one by arizonagirldiary on Tumblr, specifically because she can give the point of view I never can. She has appropriately titled her post, "A Bipolar Film From a Bipolar." Here's a little sneak peak: 
[About Excelsior]: "Not such a bad coping skill for the ups and downs of bipolar. His struggle, and resistance, to the idea of a life sentence of meds to level his ups and downs is painfully familiar and a common rite of passage for the newly diagnosed.
[...] Tiffany saves Pat. Pat saves Tiffany. This was as realistic of a scene of two mentally ill people trying to find a way to each other in cinema that I’ve seen. They’re fresh, modern, and believable as they ride their own individual roller coasters and collide with the challenges of mental illness, mixed in with the many other complexities of falling in love.

The ending is disappointing, formulaic, and predictable. But the characters, stories, and excellent film score (My Cherie Amour—Pat’s trigger; Girl from the North Country; and the pensive Maria from West Side Story) is worth an overpriced theater ticket. If you are bipolar—it’s a must see. If you have a bipolar in your life—go see and try to understand. Although just like in real life, some will and some won’t get it. In my own “n” population size of two—one got it and one did not. Just like in real life."
      This post is very personal in nature, and I like that it is an amateur review, much like mine are on this blog. It's just a girl blogging about a movie. Because of this, the review certainly provides a very interesting viewpoint; one that is kind of perfect, in my opinion.
READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE:
    
     And here's a negative review, mainly critiquing David O. Russell's change in filmmaking, and the "lazy writing" in the construction of the story and the characters themselves. The writer, Calum Marsh, claims that this film has a multitude of flaws that are ignored, because they are attributed to the 'quirky' nature of the director. Though I do not necessarily agree with the review as a whole, I quite like this passage:
"That the star-crossed love story at the center of the film is drawn between two characters defined by their respective mental illnesses is clearly its high-concept selling point, and insofar as it single-handedly transforms an otherwise entirely conventional screwball-comedy pairing into something at least marginally novel, if not exactly original, the setup alone qualifies as quintessential Russellian quirk in action.
The brand of safe, marketable mental illness brandished by the screenplay as a dramatically meaty "issue"—the kind that affects the well-being of attractive individuals without significantly reducing their attractiveness to us except in a superficial, "fixable" way—furnishes Silver Linings Playbook with the requisite passive liberalism of any well-meaning prestige picture, making it "about" something meaningful without it having to put in the work of actually meaning anything."
      It is definitely valid to speculate that this film appears to get into the grits of mental illness without actually dealing with the consistency and unfixable nature of the problem (the main reason I love the ending of Black Snake Moan, a film, in part, about a couple's struggle with anxiety and sex addiction. Sidenote: please God don't judge a book by its cover when it comes to that movie. Whoever was in charge of marketing made it look like a porno). At the end of the movie, everything is silver linings; Pat's hallucinations are gone, Tiffany's unnamed illness seems cured, everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. I can imagine that living with a mental illness, especially one so prevalent as to send a person into a psychiatric hospital less than a year ago, is a daily struggle. On the other hand, maybe David O. Russell just wanted a happy ending for his characters, though perhaps only for the time being. Maybe he wanted to show that it is possible for families to have blissfully happy times in spite of their many hardships.

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE:

(Photos from MyDailyNews.com and BlackActors.net)

     I quite like the review I'm about to introduce, though it is a negative one. It is a well-put together article with a lot of excellent points! One of my main praises for Silver Linings Playbook was that it could help us talk more about mental illness, and so I'm very open and interested in this discussion. I like L.V. Anderson's take on the matter; the filmmakers could have gone deeper with their representation and analysis of mental illness. At the same time, it could have made for a much more dramatic movie. But perhaps that is what's really needed when you're going to take on this topic. Also, I love the title of this review: "Is Silver Linings Playbook Really A Movie About Mental Illness?"
"Russell doesn’t seem particularly interested in the question of what distinguishes a person’s mental illness from his or her personality, or the question of whether medication is as effective a treatment for bipolar disorder as a pretty girl and a dance competition. Russell doesn’t highlight whether or not Pat is medicated at any given time in the film’s narrative. Though we hear Pat complain of lithium’s side effects—sluggishness, weight gain—early in the film, we don’t see him actually experience any of these side effects once he starts taking his meds.
[...] Tiffany can only win Pat by lying to him repeatedly about the goal of their dance sessions—but is nonetheless presented as a perfect romantic partner for him at the end of the film, implicitly because of her own, unnamed illness. (Silver Linings Playbook falls into the annoying trope of implying that mentally ill people can only truly be understood by other mentally ill people, the details of their respective illnesses be damned.)
[...] As messages about mental illness go, this is a sloppy one." 
     Finally, we end with a reviewer who found Silver Linings Playbook to be "hugely enjoyable." This review by Philip French praises both the writer/director and the actors for their work on this project. He acknowledges that Jennifer Lawrence's character is a popular one in Hollywood, but the actress's performance is what gives her depth and sets this movie out from the rest. Though ending with a slight criticism of the movie, I like this overview of the film as a whole:  
"The great strength of Russell's writing and direction resides in the way he consistently manages to retain a comic tone without losing touch with the characters' pains and anxieties. There are numerous scenes that in other hands would be as excruciatingly embarrassing on the screen as they would be in real life: a row in a diner, for instance, that spills out into the street on Halloween night and involves a crowd in fancy dress outside a cinema. But Russell involves us so closely in what we're watching that we become emotional participants. And that's because he cares for these people in a wholly unpatronising fashion."
READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/nov/25/silver-linings-playbook-review

 (Photo from zimbio.com)

And there you have it! The search for differing opinions actually turned out to be a lot easier than I expected it to be. After a little bit of searching, I started to get used to it. I started to get comfortable in the insecurity of my own thoughts, and in a way, it was a really positive experience. I don't think I was wrong in my review. But I feel like my opinion on the film has extended, into something that now bears multiple dimensions. At the same time, I'm really glad I already got to express my initial thoughts on the movie, without the influence of other reviewers, because it was my honest opinion. I think if I were to read other reviews before I made my own, I would feel this need to "correct" my own opinions, because of those anxieties and insecurities I have. Which is wrong!! That is not something I want for myself, at all. And somehow, even after facing other opinions, I'm still proud of the thoughts in my original review, and I don't take any of it back (:

The point of this post is not to tear down the film I raved about a few posts ago, but to point out that even the things we enjoy are not beyond criticism. Nothing is flawless. And it is possible to acknowledge the faults of a piece of work without disliking it altogether. Overall, I still think Silver Linings Playbook is a great movie! And I hope the actors in this film get the recognition they deserve in this upcoming award season. The outlook certainly looks promising on that front!  Whether the reviews above sway your opinion or not, I hope you at the very least keep an open mind while reading them. I'm doing my best not to fear a difference of opinion. And if I can do it, trust me, you certainly can too.

 ♥ Happy Watching ♥

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