Bradley Cooper is very annoying. Jennifer Lawrence almost as much. Robert de Niro is hard to bear. His wife is painfully silent… During the first half hour, I was seriously seriously annoyed by that film, not finding anything or anybody I could like. OK, there is illness involved, that that does not make that manic dude who is obsessed by the idea of getting back to the wife he lost before he was submitted to a mental hospital any more bearable. It just explains why he is talking and and waving his arms all the time. The three reasons why I stuck with that film for more than half an hour was that Cooper is really handsome (the only redeemable feature about that Las Vegas stag night film with Mike Tyson… what’s it called again?), that I dearly love Jennifer Lawrence since she played in one of the best films of the last decade (no, not “Hunger Games”, duh…), and that I wanted to see all Best Picture nominees for the 2013 Academy Awards. After surviving “Les Miserable”, what harm could “a romantic drama” do…?
Funny thing: after I fell asleep, it got much better. I only missed five minutes, but suddenly there was dynamics between the two lead characters, suddenly the film was going somewhere. Where was it going? Well… let’s say dirty dancing with mentally and emotionally challenged people, but still. They did not play it all out to full effect (I would have spent one hour more showing and thereby mocking the professional ballroom dancing scene… these fake creatures make me sick! Only sports next to synchronous swimming and women’s football that I do not watch even if the alternative is cleaning the dishes), many elements such as the Robert de Niro character with all his delusions are left hanging a bit in the air. But still, there is goal, that goal has a location, and you can practice for it. You can be crappy underdogs with a heart, and that’s what they are trying to achieve.
Why on earth this film is nominated for Best Picture while movies such as “The Master” are not, I do not know. But independent of such futile effort in Academy psychoanalysis, “Silver Linings” was not only better than it started, but actually better than you had any right to expeect when reading the synopsis. But please, Ms Lawrence, can you do something a bit more interesting next, yes, please?
thomas4cinema 