Silver Linings Playbook

Love is crazy. Men are crazy. Women are crazy. Add all of those factors together and you wind up with insanity, resulting in Silver Linings Playbook, a nutty, dysfunctional, hillarious, and pitch perfect movie that's easily my favorite film of 2012 so far. It's a damn shame if this movie is overlooked at the Academy Awards.

Silver Linings Playbook (or SLP as I will be lazily referring to from now on) begins with Pat (Bradley Cooper) being picked up from a mental institution by his mother. He's being released after discovering his wife cheating on him and beating the shit out of the history teacher that was teaching her a lesson in the shower. He's a bipolar mess and being around his parents, especially his OCD father (Robert De Niro) certainly isn't helping him feel any better. Things are looking down for him, until he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), the sister of his best friend's wife, who just might happen to match his amount of crazy with her blunt offering of sex and lack of anything similar to a filter. He's still hung up on his wife, failing to notice what the audience sees is right in front of his face the entire time.

SLP has so many strengths it's difficult to determine where to start. Both of the leads are getting a ton of attention for these roles for good reason. This is easily the best performance from Cooper and Lawrence to date. Both are absolutely pitch perfect as the hot mess, yet oddly sympathetic and lonely leads. Supporting performances from Robert De Niro and Chris Tucker also provide additional comic relief when things begin to tense up. SLP also manages to provide what many romantic comedies fail to provide; a perfect mixture of romance and comedy. Granted, you know how things will end up with the two, but the romance feels sweet and unusually authentic with a surprise or two along the way. And luckily it doesn't ever cross the territory into mushy. Thank God. SLP is also quite hillarious. The script is witty, intelligent, and fresh. Everything about the movie feels like a gift from the cinematic gods. Crazy perfect.

4/4