Being Dysfunctional Is Great (And You Can Look Okay In A Binbag Too)

David O. Russell has a really satisfying name. Less peppery than David O. Selznick, whose surname makes me think of savoury pretzels, he's also one of those directors, like Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson, who gets photographed a lot wearing a shirt and tie.

This is an informal piece about the film Silver Linings Playbook because I am wearing a cashmere sweater, jeans and it's a Sunday evening. I really enjoyed I Heart Huckabees when it came out, even after seeing that bust up between Russell and Lily Tomlin (spectacular!) and decided on the basis of a trailer I watched alone in bed on Saturday morning once that this was a film I wanted to check out to see if I felt the same way about the guy.

Obsessive compulsive behaviours are a thing close to my heart, because I have been obsessive compulsive for almost half my life. It's something that comes on and off depending on a variety of factors, mainly how tired I feel - which might mean I am just twitchy (I feel the need to do certain things more if I have had less sleep than usual on a cumulative basis) but I will always do certain things because they are part of my life. The deal, as ever, is recognising habits for what they are; physical manifestations of my mental state. In that respect I am dissimilar to other people but only because other people don't do specifically what I do.

I enjoyed Cooper's portrayal of a 'self-built' man hugely. I have never seen any Bradley Cooper films but this was a real eye-opener for me; the bull in a china shop approach I was expecting (and kind of got) was an aspect of, rather than the performance. The straight-upness of the guy was a big win for me and Cooper, with his 6 foot whatever frame, permagrizzled jawline and consistent choice of loungewear with a binbag for his street jogs came through as all goofy au naturelle rather than a calculated move. This is a film that really oozes sincerity in every hue and Cooper's Pat, saying farewell to A Farewell to Arms at 4am or watching Singin' In The Rain on his iPod (donated by his rageaholic buddy Ronnie) is an all over embodiment of that feeling. His clear-eyed focus on a goal he may never achieve through his previous sins was an admirable statement and I think Russell deserves a lot of credit for showing this without blinking.

Anybody reading this will have done so because they wanted information or (God forbid, from me) an opinion of David O. Russell (skip this blog if that's the case, I'm all shyness and weird turns in the dark) but anyway Russell is, of course, well known for his soupçon of giddy, screwball highs and social-realist lows, all of which again are delicious to my palette, and Playbook doesn't disappoint; the camerawork, a strong feature of his in Three Kings, is again employed to engaging and claustrophobic effect, particularly in the Solitano domestic household, an intense relay of a cramped and intense atmosphere in both the physical and metaphorical sense. At times it reminds me of those docu-dramas you (still?) get on terrestrial TV (usually Channel 4) 'observing' a family under pressure in some way. The Steadicam here both adds to the spicy ménage, suggesting an extra presence of induced stress, and another purely ambivalent perspective, content to watch as it blurs between a ranting Jennifer Lawrence (what a performance; great) and a slowly unpeeling Robert de Niro (my favourite character, for self-evident reasons).

It feels right to mention Lawrence on the basis that she is another actor that I have never seen in anything. Boy she is good. Most adjectives in the Depression Thesaurus feel lazy when describing this character and that's to Lawrence's great credit IMO: she is completely convincing in a plot that veers off the rails as it reaches its destination and handles her sentimental streak with the right amount of love and cynicism so that come that rather slushy conclusion you feel as though she (and Cooper) earned it. A post-game household scene in which she destroys Pat's father's (de Niro) obsession that she is redirecting his son's 'juju', much as a magnet does with filings is hilarious, and de Niro plays the obsessive to perfection, bowing to completely nonsensical reasoning in a totally lifelike manner (trust me on this; I have had exactly the same experience and was smiling whilst biting my fingers at this point).

De Niro, FWIW, is absolutely excellent. There's a charming piece on him in today's Observer and he comes across as a lovely guy, enamoured with youth and cajoling them into leading the way in life. I would be wholly unsurprised to see some sort of award going his way soon for this performance and his partnership with the wonderful, wonderful Jackie Lowe (a portrayal of desperately anxious motherly love that's completely beguiling) is the bedrock of Russell's tragicomic genesis. De Niro also lends a toughness to the film's emotional catharsis, a post-dance scene that in other hands may cloy with a sentiment too sugar-sweet for all tastes. But this is judged to perfection and the physical bond that is reignited between father and son - it's impossible to write that moment in unsentimental terms, let alone film it - was totally nutritious to me.

I was so pleased to see Russell demolish my previously held conventions on why certain scenes 'don't work' in cinema, a feeling I previously experienced in pop lit whilst reading Franzen's The Corrections. It's a delight to enjoy a thing whilst recognising elements you have seen in other films and fallen out of love with because of your judgement. I felt a reappraisal of a lot of previously held perceptions was due and ultimately the subjective part of me that responds to the rom com has changed in a definitive way. The most enjoyable experience I took away was a simple one; that whatever art is, it's definitely completely shapeless and logic and reason stand as part of the subjective experience to say anything, anything at all, can and will be fantastic in the right pair of hands.