DVD PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.: David O. Russell, 2012 (Starz/Anchor Bay)

Silver Linings Playbook is a semi-Capraesque, semi-Paddy Chayefskyesque drama/comedy for the new millennium: a smart and amusing movie felicitously co-starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver, Julia Stiles, and Chris Tucker in roles meatier than we usually expect and played with great big dollops of joyous spontaneity, live-wire energy, bristling wit and just a touch of psychological darkness.  A multiple Oscar nominee, it was definitely one of 2012’s best romantic comedies and Cooper and Lawrence one of the year’s shining couples. It was a little overrated. But movie romantic comedies have been so bad recently, that it’s gratifying ing to find one worth overrating.

The movie was adapted by writer-director David O. Russell from a novel Matthew Quick, and it’s about Russell’s favorite subject: a dysfunctional family. Here the family, the Solitanos, live boisterously together with their dysfunctional friends and neighbors, in a sort of semi-functional Philadelphia suburb — a likable but nutty community whose ailments and oddments include bipolar disorder (Cooper), severe depression and seemingly  loose morals (both Lawrence), gambling addiction (De Niro), adultery (Brea Bee), a penchant for jogging while wearing a trash bag (Cooper), and — the most inexplicable and frightening of these various disorders — an obsession with the Philadelphia Eagles getting into the Super Bowl.

At the core of the comedy is the emotional condition of Cooper as Pat Solitano, Jr. — a performance that vaults him into a some kind of new serio-comedy stratosphere. Pat Jr. is an ex-teacher suffering from that bipolar issue, who has undergone months of mental institutionalization after beating the bejeezus out of a colleague who was sleeping (and showering) with Pat’s wife Nikki (Bee). Sprung from the hospital, along with his gabby pal Danny (Chris Tucker), Pat goes back to the house of his parents: his salty Eagle-loving bookie dad Pat, Sr. (De Niro) and his tolerant mom Dolores (Weaver, who was the terrifying mother of the Australian crime drama The Animal Kingdom). Also around: Pat Jr.s bro-pal Ronnie (John Ortiz), who has a bossy wife, Veronica (Julia Stiles), who in turn has a seemingly very available cop’s-widow-friend, Tiffany (Lawrence). A nice therapeutic romance is on everyone’s mind here, though Pat, Jr., unfortunately, is obsessed with engineering a marital reunion with Nikki.

With Cooper, who zoomed to stardom in the epic buddy-buddy comedy The Hangover, and Lawrence, who conquered the critics in Winter’s Bone and then zoomed herself in The Hunger Games, chemistry isn’t lacking here. Cooper plays Pat Jr. with a mix of obstinacy and nervous intensity, plus a phony bravado, and a disguised vulnerability that make a sharp contrast with the unshakably self-confident stud he played in The Hangover. As for Jennifer Lawrence, she adds naturalistic comedy to her resume to go along with the mastery of naturalistic drama she showed in Winter‘s Bone and the heroic young womanhood of The Hunger Game.

Then there’s the acting titan turned post-Focker sitcom papa Robert De Niro, playing the meatiest and juiciest of all his recent papa roles. De Niro‘s Pat Sr., like his son, is a hothead, and he’s been banned from the Philadelphia Eagles stadium for fighting. But he still makes his living off pro sports betting, and as the plot thickens,  Pat Sr. enginers a complex betting parley that involves the Eagles winning and Pat. Jr. and Tiffany placing high as a couple in a dance contest — something she’s asked him to do as payment for her help in getting an illegal letter to Nikki.

This is all corny as hell of course — Strictly Ballroom crossed with Big Fan — but corny is okay sometimes as long as it keeps us laughing. De Niro, a master of dramatic improvisation, here shows (again) he’s also a master of comedy disguised as dramatic improvisation. He knows how to make us laugh (and to get us scared and make us cry as well). And so do do Cooper and  Lawrence.

David O. Russell doesn’t work often enough, maybe because he makes the kind of hybrid offbeat movies — these mostly dysfunctional family rom-coms, with hooks ranging from incest (Spanking the Monkey) to adoption problems (Flirting with Disaster) — that are harder  to get financed. But Russell can do something that often seems a nearly lost art in movies these days. He writes smart, snappy, funny comic dialogue that we can buy psychologically, and that the actors usually do with infectious verve and spontaneity. Russell also assembles fine casts — probably because they want to say his lines. In general he can (and does here), turn out the kind of adult, unsentimentally appealing and sharply funny entertainment that weneed more of in the movies. That’s what makes him a critics’ pet. He deserves it.

As for DeNiro, I’d like to see him in a few less sitcom papa roles, and a few more Scorsese-style parts. Then again, making people laugh — even at dysfunctional families — isn’t an unworthy occupation, as we learned in Sullivan‘s Travels. Neither is running book on the Philadelphia Eagles, though it might seem like grounds for institutionalization.

Extras: Deleted Scenes; Featurettes; Dance Rehearsal; Q & A Highlights.

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