Review: Silver Linings Playbook
from depression after her husband's death and her behaviour after that has not just earned her society's disapproval but a medical condition requiring therapy and medicines.
Amid these harmless neurotic sorts, it's only Pat's long-suffering mother Dolores (Weaver) who holds it all together. And it's a class act from Weaver, the mother hen who senses all the undercurrents and hops around nervously ensuring there are no explosions. She seems dangerously vulnerable and yet the strong matriarch who can take it all in, who gets her son out of a mental institution against the wishes of doctors and without letting her husband know, because of the strength of her belief in and love for him.
It's how well the characters are etched, in white and grey and the varying shades in between, that makes the first half of Silver Linings Playbook, directed and written for the screen by David O Russell from a Matthew Quick book, such a delight. Cooper's Pat, suffering from a bipolar disorder, is menacing, manic and hopelessly tragic in his desperation to get his wife back (she left after he almost beat her lover to death). He has episodes, picks himself up again and runs the streets dressed in a garbage bag to get himself in shape for her. Lawerence's Tiffany is flippant yet the most deeply prescient observer of people -- note the dinner at her sister's house where she meets Pat. De Niro's Pat Sr is a father who doesn't know how to handle a son who
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