Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley
Cooper in "Silver Linings Playbook."

Pat, the main character played by Bradley Cooper, is on his way home to his parents’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs during an early scene of director David O’ Russell’s uneven, quarrelsome romantic comedy “Silver Linings Playbook.” Suffering from a form of bipolar depression that leaves him alternating between condescending narcissism and outbursts of violent rage, he's hoping eight months spent in a mental care center in Baltimore will help him cope with life.

Not likely, especially when he refuses to take any medication (he says it makes him foggy) and clings deliriously to hope that his estranged wife Nikki will eventually take him back. Currently, she has a restraining order against him after he caught her cheating in the shower with another man and Pat nearly beat the man to death. Images from that episode are supplied in a bloody flashback that seems borrowed from a Quentin Tarantino movie.

If that weren't enough, Pat now has to deal with his troubled father (Robert DeNiro), an obsessive-compulsive neurotic prone to comic fits of superstition and dangerously excessive gambling (at one point, he seems to level his entire net worth against the outcome of an Eagles game), and long-suffering mother (Dolores Solitano), whose endless struggle for order amidst chaos suggests rampant co-dependency issues. Like Pat, the whole movie seems to have been skipping on its meds.

Russell, a normally highly competent director whose sharpest and funniest films—“Spanking the Monkey,” “Flirting With Disaster,” “I Heart Huckabees”—often take on characters with significant psychological quirks, struggles to find the right tone. The movie aims for playfully offbeat but misses wildly thanks to the charmless and depressive characters. There are few laughs and little charisma.

Doing her best to lift the heavy clouds of this dreary miasma of mental illness, Jennifer Lawrence arrives somewhere around the halfway mark as Tiffany, a young woman whose husband died in a car accident on his way home from Victoria’s Secret (he was hoping to jump start their sluggish relationship with a gift). And though Lawrence brings a depth, vulnerability and intensity to her scenes (something missing elsewhere in the film), it’s not quite enough.

The impossibly warm and fuzzy ending, in which Pat and Tiffany team up in a dance competition to help DeNiro win a bet—and seemingly to decide whether they are romantically compatible—rings so thoroughly false it seems to belong in another movie. You get the feeling that Russell, who based his screenplay on a novel by Matthew Quick, lost his way trying to adapt from the book.

“Silver Linings Playbook” doesn’t need an audience so much as it needs therapy.