As it happens

Jane Austen for bi-polar characters, letters included.

The most marvelous thing happened at the showing of Silver Linings Playbook (2012) I attended.  As Jennifer Lawrence's character reveals a very painful portion of her backstory, an audience member gasped and let go of a sympathetic "Ohhhh" as if this confidence was a true story being recounted in our own presence.  Even better, we all resisted the temptation to chuckle at this naive expression of sympathy, because we were not far from where that tender woman was.  At this point, still in the first act, all of us in the audience were already so invested in these characters that we had become genuinely worried about them and concerned for their emotional recovery and survival.

That's particularly impressive because at this point in the movie, they're both a pain in the neck.  That's a hallmark of the characters in writer-director David O. Russell's films, a corpus which includes Spanking The Monkey, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster, I ♥ Huckabees and The Fighter.  The films and the characters tend to be smart, acerbic, obsessed and a bit superior.  But there is a wonderful echt-Austen moment in the meeting of Lawrence's and Bradley Cooper's characters, the instant recognition of kindred damaged spirits and the consequent opening of hostilities as a mode of flirting.  Obviously, if you hate yourself, you're going to hate anyone you're attracted to, right?  After all, if your mind is broken, at least it shows you have one.



But where body and mind meet, that's where cinema lives.  So the film really takes off when Cooper and Lawrence dance together (charmingly, like the amateurs they are) to Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing."  Arlene Croce said it in her book about Astaire and Rogers:  When two characters sing together, they're falling in love; when they dance together, they want to have (or they are actually having) sex.  There is an intimate energy to the rehearsal montage (that word!) that is irresistible.

One last note -- the family dynamic is astonishingly similar to that of The Fighter, something I was thinking about in the theater before I remembered that the two films had the same writer-director.  There is the oppressive influence of the parents, the slightly soiled (and disapproved) girlfriend, the weight of brotherly expectation.   When you consider that the one piece is based on a true story and the other on an utterly unrelated novel, the critic feels invited to see autobiographical qualities in those shared elements.  And in both cases, Russell smoothly blends stars and journeyman actors into a seamless ensemble.

It seems Russell was always telling us about broken people -- it's just that he has now shifted his emphasis to the ways in which they fix themselves, and the result is exhilarating.

Enough to make you gasp and say, "Ohhhh..."

The Kids Are Alright

I was not prepared to discover how closely the recent Everybody's Fine tracked its source, Stanno tutti bene (1990), starring Marcello Mastroianni. Being the source material, and being Italian, the expressionist and surrealist tendencies (which are highlighted by the poster art seen here) feel more natural. Italy is naturally a place of abundance, where images tumbling upon each other simply reflects the landscape. The America DeNiro's character traveled through was spare, ascetic, almost barren. Both characters have absurd dreams, but Mastroianni's are more at home in the Italian landscape.

Moreover, DeNiro, even at his most gentle is a coiled spring. He could strike, and if he did, you would get hurt. Mastroianni may have looked like a leading man, but he projected the poetry of loss from his lonely, injured eyes. When DeNiro looks like he should given his kids a knock on the head, Mastroianni looks like he's wondering how they got that knock on the head.

The downside of that is that we never feel that Mastroianni achieves peace and equilibrium. His children's lies are a hurt from which he does not recover. DeNiro is hurt as well, but he seems to understand how and why it happened, and that he shares responsibility. Both films have their virtues, and if you like one of them, the other will probably interest you. Their respective virtues and shortcomings balance out--they are roughly equal accomplishments.

The Italian film does have music by Morricone--an unfair advantage, that.

"Fine" means "end" in Italian. Did you know that?

If, like me, you've seen the ads and trailers for Everybody's Fine (2009), you may think you know what it's going to be like. It's not like that.

I was expecting a touch of About Schmidt and a bit of Harry and Tonto. Widowed father, being pushed aside, misunderstood, learning to be sensitive to this children in his gruff, but loveable way. What is remarkable about this film is the way it manages to steer away from cliché. And that goes straight down to Robert DeNiro's acting, which was threatening, with films such as Analyze This and Meet the Fockers to degenerate entirely into Jack Nicholson-style reflexive vaudeville. DeNiro manages to inhabit the screen without the usual feeling of threat and danger. His character rides his children and worries for them, but without projecting his own ambitions on them. And he is a man without anger. DeNiro plays a man without anger, without recrimination.

And my wife and my daughter and I all cried at the same place in the movie. It was without words, no big hugs, no facial close-ups. It was extremely crafty. DeNiro's character is a blue-collar fellow who has raised all creative people. He spent his working life coating telephone wire. At first you think it simply labels him as a working man, and it is handy because he can look at the telephone wire as he rides the train. The director and editor can even lay in the sound of phone calls over the traveling shots of the wire to bridge sequences.

But the wire is a true visual metaphor for the connections that DeNiro's character's wife once provided and now DeNiro himself needs to make with his family. And that metaphor comes up and whacks you in the face when you're not expecting it, and damn you, Kirk Jones (writer-director), you made me cry.

Also there's some...what, surrealism? expressionism? Anyway, past and present blend in a way that seems gimmicky at first but is at last eloquent, and while I don't usually worry about spoilers, I think you should experience it yourself. To use an adjective that my son once used about a work of mine, it's satisfying.