Called a dramedy, or a quirky romcom, Silver Lining Playbook (nominated for Best Picture; Best
Director (David O. Russell, The Fighter);
Best Actor (Bradley Cooper, The Hangover);
Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger
Games); Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro); Best Supporting Actress
(Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom) is based
on a book of the same name by Matthew Quick, and it is very, very funny-- in a hmmm, more than ha ha, kind of way. Still, I laughed out loud, not the least when
Patrizio Solitano, Jr’s (Bradley Cooper) psychiatrist Dr. Patel (Anupam Kher) tells him
he needs “a strategy,” as if that, in and of itself, would help this man’s terribly
chaotic life. (As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I have a bias for
exploratory therapy and for relationship. Sure, discipline and will are components of success, but so is
good enough parenting.) Pat needed not only advice and medication, but psychotherapy.
(My psychiatrist- psychoanalyst friend with whom I saw the film also roared here with laughter. We both know that patients who seek mental health treatment for advice don’t need advice
as much as they need to figure out why they can’t take the advice they have
already been given.)
But Dr. Patel’s advice turns out to be the heart of Silver Lining Playbook, the playbook (in
sports’ circles) being the strategy. Who’da
thunk the strategy would be preparing for a dance competition and falling in
love. What I like about this film is that the strategy, to survive this crazy
curve ball life throws us, is that it takes a village, a team, family and
friends, pulling for you, rooting for you, and strategizing, then, implementing
with you, a plan.
I was especially taken with Jacki Weaver’s performance as Dolores
Solitano, the perpetually worried-looking mother. Perhaps having a son who has bipolar disorder who was
recently hospitalized for a violent loss of temper would make any mother walk
on eggshells (as would the unpredictable violence of any loved one). I wondered to myself if Dolores herself had
not always been anxious, from childhood unpredictability of her own, and how
this anxiety might be communicated, day in and day out, to her sons from their infancy
via affect mirroring (where infants, in imitating the facial expressions of
their mothers, signal their brains to feel what the facial musculature
indicates) or via a disorganized attachment of her own. Small children, too, need a strategy for
coping with stress, and in the absence of a strategy -- because the parent as a
safe haven is also the stressor, children do not know whether to approach for
comfort or flee/freeze in alarm—a child becomes disorganized and disoriented,
including moments of dissociation from the double bind. (Cooper, for example,
in his confusion, pursues the very wife who betrayed him.)
There are many theories about the etiology of bipolar disorder,
including the genetic. But should we muse psychoanalytic, I think Pat, perhaps
having learned sadness and anxiousness from his mother’s style, coped with these
unpleasant affects by their very opposite, manic grandiosity. (In my experience,
bipolar adults have usually been the designated ‘savior’ of their distressed
family, with grand expectations thrust upon their shoulders.This was not the
case in the Solitano family, where the older brother was preferred, by the
father, to be the achiever.) Bipolar Disorder or not, I wonder if Pat did not
suffer with affective dysregulation. No matter.
His taking his medications relieved his parents’ anxieties about him. Some
in the mental health profession have accused Silver Lining Playbook of spouting love, in lieu of medications, as
treatment of mental illness. Bipolar disorder definitely requires medication, but affect dysregulation (sometimes treated with meds until self regulation, through long term intensive psychotherapy dealing with attachment, relationship
and improving a sense of self, is achieved) may find sufficiently reliable,
accepting, soothing, and negotiated love lends itself to self regulation (I recall Tender Mercies). Besides, people, even
with, maybe especially with, psychiatric illness do better with love.
Cooper is redeemed not only by chance, I mean dance, but
by the love and support of family and friends. As ill-conceived as the help of
his parents may be, their love and concern, dawning much like it does on the
adult emerging fresh from adolescence, eventually shines through. Jacki Weaver
is brilliant as the worried mother who indefatigably walks on eggshells trying
not to set her son off into a manic episode. Jennifer Lawrence is as talented
here as everywhere I’ve seen her, meeting, out of a desire for connectedness,
Cooper’s craziness where she finds it. In this regard, she may have been the
better therapist.
Like Django
Unchained, Silver Lining Playbook, riffing on an unfunny subject (here, mental illness), is a black
comedy of sorts, and most of the humor is fueled by disbelief about what the
characters do next.
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