Review: Silver Linings Playbook

There seem to be two kinds of 'mental illness' films. Ones where the nutters get better and ones which seem to say mental illness doesn't exist. Personally I tend to go for the latter. Crazy people are fun to watch, that's a fact. They're more fun to watch than any ordinary arsehole being crazy because crazy people are genuinely unpredictable, capable of brutality or tenderness with the same stimulus depending on how they are internally at that point in time. For that reason, I like my nutters in film out and proud. Nutters don't like straightjackets. Take any nutter, ask them if they want to be cured or continue their conversations with the Archangel Gabriel, King Ferdinand and George Washington. Silver Linings Playbook wants to be cured. And it's cured alright.

David O. Russell is a nutter. Anybody who's seen Spanking the Monkey or I Heart Huckabees knows that. In particular, anybody who's seen his outburst at Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees knows that (seriously, if you haven't seen it, GET ON IT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Qls1rAfYs). I loved I Heart Huckabees, something about the completely absurd nature of it all. Something about Isabelle Huppert and Jason Schwartzman making out in the mud. Something about Naomi Watts acting the shit out of discovering her existence. I Heart Huckabees shows what film can be when continuity of a diegetic reality is prioritised over it's verimisimilitude. However it does of course have it's flaws, it's a pseudo-philosophical comedy of 90 minutes and to be honest, it's souffle light. And though, through the making of it Russell, by his own admission 'had [his] head up [his] ass', it's just so uninhibited and ridiculous that you can't help but go along with it's madness.

You'd assume mental illness would be a veritable banquet to a loony director. For the most part it is. But here we see a mid-forties Russell creating a broadly palatable movie for Harvey Weinstein and a North American distribution deal, pushing for a November release and awards season. As a result, there is enough to engage, relate and excite but it's all just a bit tame. It feels made to get a 90 in a test screening. Every detail ironed out within an inch of its life, transparent devices aplenty. An example, very specific tiny detail that typifies this is the especially grumpy final judge at the dance competition. As Pat Jr. runs around looking for Tiffany, scores are read out '75, 73, 76… 69'. Oh that grumpy judge, she doesn't have no love for nobody, Pat finds Tiffany, 'why you drinking girl?', '76,79,77… 70'. DAMN that grumpy judge, these stakes so high! You gonna be the end of us! Let's dance! Of course once Pat and Tiffany dance, this resolves itself the only way it can - '48, 49, 48… 54!?!?' YAYAYAYAY WHO WOULDA THUNK IT? OUR JOURNEY IS SO UNDENIABLY UPLIFTING EVEN GRUMPY JUDGE BECAME HAPPY FOR US!!! Odd detail to zone in on but it kinda typifies a formulaic attitude to raising the stakes of a climax with a transparent device that is so effective that nobody can resist the joy! Having said that, within context, to be honest I loved it.

In the opposite direction, what feels like the most obvious Chekhov's gun ever leaves quite early. It's Pat's emotional trigger, Stevie Wonder's Mon Cherie Amour, which is both his wedding song and the song his wife had playing when he found her cheating on him. Great, he's going to hear it in the climax and it'll put everything in jeopardy and yay, he'll go insane or learn to accept himself and his illness. But no, it was dispelled about 40 minutes into the film, gone forever. Good call.

A lot has been made of the performances and with good reason. Jennifer Lawrence is particularly good but you do get the feeling that sometimes she doesn't know why. De Niro and Weaver are unsurprisingly lovely. But a big problem was that I felt like Bradley Copper wasn't insane enough. He did all this work but he didn't get the fire behind the eyes, something manic people get, this fire that he didn't or couldn't go far enough to nail. What I'm saying is he didn't get ugly enough and that isn't limited to Cooper. The reality is for all the truth and verisimilitude, these are Lennon's 'beautiful people'. I find this distorted reality as distracting as some seem to find absurdism.

After seeing Silver Linings Playbook, a film about actually mentally ill people, it's clear that Russell is done with unbridled insanity. Sitting more comfortably alongside Three Kings and The Fighter than I Heart Huckabees and Spanking the Monkey. I suppose people will call Silver Linings Playbook a natural maturation and the arrival of a director whose promise has finally been realised. That's probably fair enough, he feels like he's making his way towards becoming a poor man's Scorsese. Similar attitudes to performances and camera movement are both evocative of a certain Scorsese aesthetic. It's particularly the control of the performances that lends a certain strength to the film. However, the handheld aesthetic, so in vogue in the American indie cinema of the 21st Century, can grate and feel unnecessary at times but it still preserves the punch and masculinity. Combined with the movement, it gives a certain look that I think may come to be considered (possibly unfairly) Russell's own.

This film is a nutter in a straitjacket. Every moment of imminent lunacy starts to inflate like a big red balloon only for Weinstein's pin of rom com formula come in and pop it. It feels like at the very least it could do with a padded cell, something to leap around and headbutt and punch and kick and vomit on. It's a film that feels like it wants to be let loose, it wants an extended sequence of delusion and depravity. Of course, it isn't there. And in a way, that's what makes this film what it is. Russell had his time in the mud and the murky depths of the mind and soul. Silver Linings Playbook is about quelling the insanity within by ultimately accepting it. In that it succeeds. But personally, I'm still interested in the other kind of mental illness film, the one that doesn't end with two beautiful people kissing on a couch in a harmonious family home.

Review: Zero Dark Thirty

  Attempts to properly chronicle the post-9/11 era have more or less been clumsy up to this point. In fact the mere mention of the term post-9/11 in connection to a work of art creates a resounding groan amongst pretty much everyone. Cut-out terrorist villains and reductive Bush-Cheney allegories have plagued western media for a decade, trying sincerely, but inadequately, to inject some relevance to an audience used to a uniquely depressing news cycle. What that era, and my generation to an extent, is lacking is an artistically strong and well-defined artistic narrative that is both challenging and uncanny in it's familiarity. When I studied the film, music and literature of the Cold War I was amazed with how the artists of the era were able to break down the largely political conflict into it's basic components and use them to construct a both timely and timeless examination of how this defined a culture. Placed in the sweet spot between emotional immediacy and historical perspective, Zero Dark Thirty has hit that mark.

While advertised as a dramatization of the raid that killed Bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty is actually a decade spanning drama of one woman's dangerous obsession with capturing the most wanted man in the world. Jessica Chastain imbues Maya with the right mix of professional distance and personal drive; she's a fully formed character, and an interesting one but she is also drawn in such a way as to stand in for the emotions of an entire nation. The audience is drawn into the pursuit in what should be the most tacky and exploitative scene ever put on film: an imageless sound collage of the phone calls from within the twin towers. At first it seems Bigelow is carelessly trying to pump up the audience's bloodlust in anticipation of the rootin-tootin terrorist-shootin' finale but this film is much more complex.

The film sinks deeper into shades of grey as it goes on, without making the false assumption that 'humanizing' terrorists and turning the CIA into mustache-twirling villains is the way to achieve that. After the monstrosity of the twin tower bombing we shift to a detainment camp in Pakistan where Joel Edgerton ruthlessly, though somehow not sadistically, tortures a suspected bankroller of terrorism. The torture is brutal, realistic and uncomfortable yet we never quite sympathize with the victim. There is no question about his guilt and after having 9/11 vividly replayed for us it's hard to ultimately care about his fate. Yet the scene is unquestionably confronting and uncomfortable not because of the victim but because of the perpetrator. The reasoning behind the opening scene now becomes clear: it's not about justice or security but about revenge. From there the film establishes it's rhythm: the terrorists attack innocent civilians and the CIA repay them with cruel and unusual punishment. The bodies pile up higher on both sides and Maya's involvement goes from disturbed reservation to complete complicity in her pursuit of, in her mind justice and security but in reality, revenge. In establishing this rhythm Bigelow finally hits on what defines this moment in history. Where the Cold War was an absurdly abstract dialectical conflict that played out in absurdly tragic ways, the War on Terror was the geopolitical equivalent of a cat fight, dirty and degrading for everyone involved.

There's a telling scene where Maya confronts here skeptical boss (played fantastically by Friday Night Light's Kyle Chandler) about his lack of interest in capturing Bin Laden and he tells her that he's a symbolic target rather than a practical one. She lays out the reasons why he is indeed an essential target in protecting America and we are meant to agree with her, being the feisty heroine that she is, yet it's hard not to realize how strong a point he has. What really is the point in finding Bin Laden? Once again, the answer is revenge. The beautiful part of the film is that it never judges or disagrees with it's characters, and by extension America, for needing that revenge. Maya and her country need that closure of putting the bullet in Bin Laden's head but it's not any less sad that they have been put in that mindset in the first place.

As the film unfolds and these complex emotions surface it almost feels like the Bin Laden raid would make for an ill-fitting climax dramatically but instead we get the perfect cap off to a great movie. Bigelow channels all the technical bravado she gained from The Hurt Locker into a sequence that is both thrilling and strangely distancing. The exploits of the navy seals are performed in such a methodical way that killing Bin Laden fills like a menial task that simply has to be performed. There is no carthasis or sense of victory when the bullet lands, merely a sense of relief that the last nasty ten years can finally be brought some kind of closure. As the final shot reinforces (I won't spoil it) the events of the film are not meant to inspire fist-pumping pro-Americanism or fire up liberal anti-Bush vitriol, they are a complex and dirty affair. And a very sad one at that.

Review: Django Unchained

He like the way you die, boy.

When Tarantino unleashed his first revisionist period piece Inglourious Basterds three years ago, there was the odd raising of eyebrows from those who thought he was sincerely trying to trick those impressionable 'MTV youths' into thinking Hitler's bullet-ridden corpse was blown away in a Parisian theater  While Tarantino's tongue-in-cheek postmodern sounds like an offensive ways to deal with the Nazis it became clear, once the dust settled, that Tarantino was making a movie not about World War II but about World War II movies. With Django Unchained he doesn't have much of an established myth to play off of so he has to sort of start from scratch, using genre confines as building blocks instead of points of reference. This makes Django Unchained a bit more straightforward and hot-blooded. The film's slightly more grounded mood means there is less irony and self-awareness which is less grating for some, less intelligent for others.

It's telling of the subject matter and it's presentation that Django has become, even by Tarantino's standards, immensely polarizing: it's artistic and moral credibility being both vigorously defended and attacked. What's also interesting is that in every review of the film I've read, both positive and negative, it's clear how hard it is for many critics to form a clear opinion. The combination of a controversial subject matter, brutal and stylized violence and frequent lapses into silliness make this a hard film to articulate personally, let alone critically. The AV Club gave a pretty good example of this mindset in this article, where the task of reviewing Django Unchained was treated like a grenade no one wanted to jump on (their metaphor not mine).

The reason for this can be attributed to this movie being Tarantino's most straightforward film since Jackie Brown while also being his most unique. The story is linear and the genre rules are mostly adhered to but it's still built around one of the most collectively repressed cultural memories in the world. So is Django Unchained cathartic? Not quite. There's scenes of confronting cruelty and ones of cartoonish violence but the film refuses to connect those dots. I can't think of a film that is so ruthless in its pursuit of exposing America's historical hypocrisy. There is not a single sympathetic Caucasian American in the film and, in another bold twist, a German expat is the film's paragon of racial harmony. Samuel L Jackson adds a further layer of depth with his extraordinary performance as the scarred but ruthlessly brutal Stephen. It's a complex take on the cringe-worthy Uncle Tom stereotype that adds a much deeper layer to the racial politics.

But for all of the cultural critique this is still a film where women get blown away by guns at absurd angles, where Tupac and James Brown can invade pre-civil war Mississippi and where every character is introduced with a beautifully absurd bump in. He may have moved on to grander subject matter but Tarantino definitely hasn't lost his schlocky sweet tooth and I, for one, am thankful for that.

These opposing sides of Django can be problematic but they never fail to provoke. Trashy genre fare is Tarantino's passion and by extension it's how he brings passion to what has become a distant subject matter. When everything is said and done he is simply too talented a filmmaker to create anything less than a thoroughly engaging movie. Django Unchained isn't a perfect movie but this can't be boiled down to a single flaw or wrong turn: it is a general uncertainty and uneasiness that accompanies exiting the theater. And ultimately I think that this is the response Tarantino was aiming for and given the subject matter, rightfully so.