SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK: I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH CONTINUES

I actually reviewed Silver Linings Playbook back in November for the 'three points' section of our Americarnage podcast (that's Americarnage.co.uk, or via Itunes), but because I was also talking about Elliott Carter's death, the discussion was edited out. Since then, the film won the BAFTA for best adapted screenplay, which surprised me because in Britain the 'Playbook' part of the title of the film was virtually disappeared, and the football elements usually put British audiences, and critics, off. But when I sat down to write about the film, I found myself thinking first about the appeal David O Russell, and the odd fact that in the past 18 years, he done only six feature films.

Spanking The Monkey could almost be the quintessential independent first picture; I remember it blowing me away at the London Film Festival, primarily because of the way it managed to approach a taboo subject, and some sensitive relations, with both sensitivity and humour. And I was so impressed with Alberta Watson's performance, and have since watched her nail many parts, but not the big-ticket one that she deserved.

Spanking The Monkey foreshadowed the Russell who specialises in off-beat relationships, which is what Silver Linings is all about, though its characters aren't as willfully offbeat as those in other comedies he wrote and directed, like Flirting With Disaster (of which more shortly) or I Heart Huckabees. On the serious side, Russell also made Three Kings, still the best movie anyone's done about the American 'conquest' of the Middle East, even though it was made before the last two invasions, and Kathryn Bigelow's essays into them. Three Kings was, like Silver Linings, adapted from other sources, while The Fighter, which got Russell his first Oscar nomination for best director, was his only film where he doesn't have a writing credit. It also got Melissa Leo, an underappreciated New York actress right out of the Alberta Watson template, another much-deserved Oscar (though more deserved for Frozen River!)

A cynic might think Silver Linings is a combination of the two: the offbeat comedy which Russell creates himself, and a sporting subplot and metaphor to make it more interesting on the mainstream level. But I found that, despite enjoying the film for the most part, my cynicism hit a mother lode of Silver Linings.

It's the kind of film where everyone is a bit off, which is supposed to make them funny to comfortable audiences. But where it doesn't work is that Bradley Cooper, who has anger issues (inherited, obviously, from his father Robert DeNiro, who's been banned from Eagles' games for fighting) never really seems angry enough. He's acting hard, but he keeps this reserve of rational intelligence, or likeability, behind his eyes. We can believe the violence in DeNiro beneath the hamming because he's DeNiro, but with Cooper, we think there's something more going on. If you might see a lot of DeNiro's performance in Meet The Fockers here, it isn't surprised, since Russell supposedly did script-doctoring on that film, and as we'll see, there is a lot of revisiting going on in this film.

What's new and different is Jennifer Lawrence, although again, as a widow and a 'recovering sex addict' her character Tiffany is given faults too good to be true, from the film-maker's point of view. But Lawrence does an amazing job of projecting her ultimate vulnerability—I rather doubt she gets the Oscar this year, but I wouldn't complain if she did, since she so richly deserved one for Winter's Bone. She gets the best lines, of course, and her letter to Pat is corny but may be the best moment of the film (apart from any moments with Jacki Weaver, as Cooper's mother and DeNiro's wife, enduring them). In fact the contrasting marriages; Pat's best friend is married to Tiffany's sister; she dominates him, and they live an upwardly-mobile life that's killing him to maintain. It's a contrast to Pat's parents (Tiffany's parents barely register) and everyone else in the lower-middle class neighbourhood they live in, but it's a sharper contrast to our kooky couple...at least until the end.

But what really doesn't work is the integration of the football, which is sloppy—I complained on Americarnage about DeNiro making the show's big bet on a game whose point spread would not have been fixed at the time, and you could notice the anachronistic Eagles' jerseys in the crowd-- but what was in there for a gratuitious laugh was the whole Indian Eagles fans and the fight—since one of them is Pat's therapist, you'd think his fighting at the stadium would make more of a point toward the story, but it basically just in there for a cheap ethnic laugh. Too bad they weren't playing the Redskins.

And what is especially cynical of me is thinking that the whole 'Dancing With The Stars' subplot is redolent of Slumdog Millionaire. Yes, you say, but this is what America does, pattern their lives and live their hopes to the incessant beat of so-called 'reality' television, but to me this is simply something up to date and popular on which Russell could hitch the basic scenario of Flirting With Disaster: the love triangle between the kooky guy (Ben Stiller, on whom Cooper is an improvement), the wife who doesn't care (Patricia Arquette) and the kooky woman to whom the kooky guy is attracted (Tea Leoni). There it was a quest for his parents, here it is a quest to get his job and wife back, even though the latter doesn't want him.

You can see where the novel might have appealed to Russell, and beneath the triangle he recognised were the extra plotlines, the rehab requirements, the dancing competition, and most of all the football. But really they don't go much of anywhere, especially the football, which is laden with potential metaphors for this story which went untapped. Similarly, the dancing, in the end, becomes its own payoff and telegraphs its own ending.

As I said, Silver Linings Playbook is entertaining enough; it simply does carry the weight of its own storyline to any sort of 'best picture' degree. Which is why I find it surprising he's been nominated for best director because his direction is completely in service to the screenplay, and the set-pieces are very mundane. I think that's deliberate, because as I say, I think Russell's most interested in his triangle, and everything else is just a series of devices to get him to the payoff. Besides, Flirting With Disaster II isn't a very catchy title.

THE WRESTLER: Oscar Catch-Ups Continue

The Wrestler is a film with a lot of similarities to Slumdog Millionaire (see previous post) but one huge difference. Both are films about outcasts, although their arcs are opposite: Randy 'the Ram' Robinson has once been a huge star, and is now existing on the fringes of society, while Jamal in Slumdog works his way out of the fringes to that 15 minutes of fame (and wealth) 'reality' TV promises every zombie who watches it. Their sub-cultures are outside the cinema-goers mainstreams as well; Randy's world of small-time, extreme wrestling is as alien to most Western audiences as the slums of Mumbai. The both love a woman who is the 'property' of men with more money to spend, and they both have a problematic relationship with their family: Jamal's brother takes advantage of him numerous times; Randy has abandoned his daughter.

The big difference, however, is while Slumdog takes an original idea (cuing flashbacks from the questions of the quiz show) and fills it with cliches drawn from films and from our perceptions of India, The Wrestler starts with a cliched story, about the redemption of a fallen sports hero, but avoids, for the most part, surrendering to the cliches. It's helped by the hand-held, documentary feel, which emphasizes both the weirdness of Randy's wrestling world, in which he is still a king, and his 'real' world, living in a trailer on which the rent is always due, working on a supermarket loading dock, and spending his free time with a lap-dancer. The New Jersey setting is as bleak, cold and washed out as Slumdog's Mumbai was bright, warm, and edgy.

Aaronofsky pulls no punches in his portrayal of wrestling's minor leagues: the Necro Butcher stapling a dollar bill to his own forehead, or using a fork to draw blood, the various steroid and other freaks who gather in the high school locker rooms, are all part of the same reality that sees Randy demonstrate 'blading' himself for the movie audience. Welcome to his world. The camaraderie of the wrestlers, the dreams of the big time, the dependence on drugs, the small-time payoffs for big-time effort are all shockingly, and depressingly real. And so is the quiet boredom of the wrestlers sitting around their huckster tables at a 'fan fest' waiting for a few marks to pay for having a Polaroid taken with their heroes.

Although wrestling is the heart of the film, it's in the relationships with the two women in his life that Randy's world is defined. His shambling efforts to effect a reconciliation with his daughter are touching, and his throwing the opportunity away for a night with a young woman who's not even really a fan, just impressed by his former celebrity, brings the start of self-awareness. But it's the pursuit of Cassidy, the lap-dancer who eventually reveals herself to him as 'Pam', a single-mother trying to make a living, that defines Randy for himself and for us. Director Darren Aronofsky makes the parallels between the two forms of entertainment obvious, but their attitudes to their jobs are completely different; Pam won't be fooled by the cheap glamour of her role. The point is driven home again, when, after his heart attack, Randy makes an effort to go straight, and moves to the deli counter of the supermarket. His walk through the bowels of the store mirrors his walk to the wrestling ring, and for a short while his natural ability as an entertainer sees him through.

In the end though,the biggest mark for wrestling is Randy himself. Randy, we learn, is not even his real name; he is 'The Ram', and that's where he's most real. That he prefers to live in the fantasy is the most real part of this film, and it's why in the end, it's far more moving than the more superficially attractive Slumdog.

And, of course, there's Mickey Rourke's performance. Having not yet caught up with Milk, I can't compare it directly with Sean Penn's, but from the clips and trailers, I am guessing that Penn's ability to stay in character, to catch the nuances of Harvey Milk, impressed the voters more than the sense that Rourke was, in fact, in character. Not playing his own character, as John Wayne did, say, in True Grit, but playing himself, the entertainer who spend a long time out of the major leagues. He gets good support, although one still gets the sense that Marisa Tomei, who surely deserved her Oscar nomination--though in a sense Hollywood tends to reward roles as working-class people the same way they do playing the disabled--seems at least as interested in displaying to producers that she still has the chops to do her lap dancing, and I don't say this facetiously, because she did the same thing in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (so it must be working), as she is in exploring the Pam moments (as opposed to the Cassidy moments) of her character. But Evan Rachel Wood clearly relishes her few moments alone with Rourke, her character's tentative reaction to finding, or thinking she'd found, the person underneath the wrestling persona. In that sense, she stands in for the audience, or at least that part of the audience that feels betrayed when Randy the Ram follows his fantasy.

SLUMDOG OR HANGDOG? I.T. finally takes on the Oscar winner

If Slumdog Millionaire had been a Hollywood film, rather than a British one, would it have been greeted by shocked disgust by British critics? Having finally seen it, I don't begrudge it its Oscar--it falls into the proud tradition of Forrest Gump. In fact, Dev Patel's hangdog face would be perfect if Bollywood ever decide to do a musical version of Gump; he could play in the IPL cricket, serve against Pakistan, whatever. But I wish it had been considered in the foreign film category, because its closest equivalent is Life Is Beautiful. Both are films whose basic horrors are true, but whose approach to them is to use them as devices in order to make a larger, and less horrific point. In the case of Slumdog, this use is far more obvious, because it is so contrived--stemming from the quiz-show questions to cover a potted cross-section of the dark side of life in India.

Slumdog is a watchable feel-good film, and indeed was sold as such (see above), albeit one whose twists are both cliched and telegraphed, full of 'Ray Charles could see THAT coming' moments. It's told in flashback from what appears to be the Indian version of Midnight Express, as if Jamal had wandered into an Alan Parker movie. Jamal's brother has chosen old-time Hollywood, as he features in the Indian version of Angels With Dirty Faces (and with a nod to more recent American gangsterism, Madhur Mittal looks almost like an American black).

Of course, I am willing to cut them a little slack in terms of relating to Bollywood conventions, and a little good natured hommage is always appropriate in a film you're enjoying (though oddly enough never in a film you don't) but it is hard to enjoy such contrivance and cliche. Even English cliche, in the enormous caca pooh-pooh joke young Jamal endures, methaphorically. The contrivance comes via The Millionaire programme, adding organically to the drama only once, in the late interchange between Patel and Anil Kapoor, about the Jack Hobbs answer. Otherwise, it's a nice gimmick to drive a plot told in flashback alongside one in real time, but contrivance? Falling off a train and rolling up literally to the Taj Mahal? Jamal comes back more often than Monty Python's limbless knight

This is India presented in terms of the things most westerners know about it already, which is to say, cliches: from call centers to slums. And its overall message, that watching TV shows like Milllionaire will somehow transform India into a country where the Hindu mobs cheer Jamal on rather than burn his slum and kill his mother seems somehow facile, as if Thomas Friedman's idea that all the world is fat like his America, had somehow come true. Oscar loves this kind of thing.

And now that Jamal is a milionaire, I expect a Rocky III type sequel: he got what he wanted but he lost what he had! Jamal has to fend off thousands of friends, ersatz relatives, and strangers with their hands out; bandits aiming at robbing the Muslim millionaire; he decides to own a cricket team in the IPL; Latika decides she wants a Bollywood career--pure Oscar gold!