Silver Linings Playbook

CLWheeljack · February 28, 2013, 7:43am

I posted a quick note in the main Academy Awards thread, since there wasn’t a dedicated thread at the time. My comments from there:

2013 Acadamy Awards

So, there’s no thread for Silver Linings Playbook, but I just wanted to note that I saw it this past week, and it’s really a very good movie. It’s not challenging or ironic or anything, but it’s a really well told story, well acted, with believable characters, and some absolutely great writing. Walking out, I thought “I can’t think of a single thing that movie did wrong”, which is pretty rare. I guess you might call it a “perfect” movie in that regard.

The core is a romantic comedy, but it doesn’t try to subvert it the way something like Young Adult did, it just uses the Rom-com as its foundation to build characters and relationships. It talks a lot about mental illness, in myriad forms (including obvious but undiagnosed ones), and treats it in a very real way, the way people really talk about mental illness. But fundamentally, I think it’s telling a story about the American experience.

If I really wanted to complain, I’d say they over-explained the “if it’s me reading the signs” reveal. But that’s a very small complaint.

I’m curious if you could explain why?

I assume you’re talking about having them get together at the end. In that regard, I find that although it dealt with relatively dark subject matter in places, this never tried to be anything more than a romantic comedy. The people in a classic romantic comedy are just as broken as the characters here, they’re just broken in less realistic ways. So, by the end, you know what’s coming, because it’s firmly within the genre, but it’s a very well done genre piece.