Throughout
the history of film, mental health has never really been a taboo subject. From “Greenberg” to “Bottle Rocket” some of
my favorite movies involve people who are getting out of psychiatric
hospitals.
However,
“Silver Linings Playbook” takes that notion and turns it into, well, a
Hollywood sort of fairytale. The main
character comes out of the hospital hoping to reconnect with his wife (Yes,
they are still married) and instead ends up with someone who is seen as being
equally insane as him.
This
presents us with two huge misconceptions right from the start: 1) People cannot reconcile when coming out of
a mental hospital (So hey, why bother going in, right? Stay untreated!) and 2) Crazy people belong
with other crazy people, but only if they’re both medically diagnosed as being
crazy.
Another
funny event occurred in this movie and I’m not sure how I feel about it except
that as someone with intelligence it offends me and doesn’t pass as decent
writing no matter what level you’re at.
When the
main character, Pat, wants to get a letter to his wife, Nicky, he attempts to
do so with the help of her friend Tiffany.
Tiffany only agrees to help him though if he enters a dance contest with
her. Yes, people, he has to practice
and enter a dance contest with her.
I know
that the whole idea of this movie is supposed to be “people are crazy, so now
they can be crazy together”, but a dance contest? Really?
Apparently when people get out of mental hospitals they do crazy things
(or so this movie would want you to believe)
But
wait, it gets worse from there. Aside
from the whole gambling problem his father has and how that’s exploited and
treated like it’s okay, let’s look into the fact that Tiffany never gave Nicky
the letter that Pat wrote and instead wrote back pretending to be his wife.
So what
did this movie teach us? If you’re a
slut with a mental disorder and dead husband, there is still hope for you to
find someone yet. All you have to do is
deceive them into a dance contest, lie to them under the guise of their wife
and then, you know, hope it all works out like in this movie.
Only
this is Hollywood, so in real life, the character of Pat probably would have
had a breakdown and beaten Tiffany to death for lying about something like his
marriage, which he seemed to value so much throughout the movie up until that
one point where he was just so nonchalant about it.
I don’t
know what delusional world you have to live in to appreciate this film, but I
do not want to go there. I can suspend
my disbelief for a lot of things, but this movie just left me outraged by its
inaccuracies.
