LONDON CITY NIGHTS: romantic comedy

Thursday, June 13, 2013

'Stuck in Love' (2012) directed by Josh Boone

Thursday, June 13, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

Stuck in Love is a film where an idiot, writer/director Josh Boone, tries to imagine what smart people act like. I hated this film. I really, really fucking despised it. I despised it to the point where my head was throbbing with sheer hatred. I sunk down in my seat lower and lower as it went on, a black aura with hints of crimon forming around me. I was a gravitational black hole of sheer unadulterated anger that someone out there would have the nerve to make a film this godawfully shitty. I was glaring at the screen with such ferocity that I half expected it to catch fire, so strong were the dark, negative vibes streaming out of me.

‘Warm Bodies’ (2013) directed by Jonathan Levine, 5th February 2013

Thursday, February 7, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Why are zombies so popular at the moment? I’ve seen books about how to survive a zombie invasion, shot hordes of them bits in videogames, even met people with actual honest-to-god zombie preparedness plans and, of course, watched an inordinate amount of films about people surviving their way through the ruins of the modern world, now infested with shambling corpses. What does this obsession say about us?

I find the whole craze a bit tasteless; zombie invasion as an outlet for people's anti-social, violent fantasies. Everyone imagines themselves as the lone survivor, a ruthless and pragmatic shotgun wielding warrior eking their way across a damned world full of mindless, flesh-eating monsters. One of the most common factors in zombie survival films is the necessity of ruthlessness. The cliché scene is the frazzled survivor coming across a zombie and “oh no!” it’s their father. But he’s one of the undead now, and the only right thing to do is to shoot him in the head. It’s this frame of mind that I find most disturbing; the notion of surviving a zombie outbreak is a socially acceptable fantasy allowing you to murder or dismember your friends, family and countless strangers.

R (Nicholas Hoult)

The solipsism inherent in the premise also bugs me. The zombie genre promotes a view of the individual being the most important unit in society. The worst fate in a zombie film is to be infected and become one of the masses, to join the shambling hordes. Traditionally zombies are a metaphor for mindless consumerism, but I’m with ‘The Real Doctor Phil’ on this when he identifies them thusly:

“Zombies as a horror staple are the result of some unfathomable biological or supernatural crisis that cannot be reversed. They are mindless. They are faceless. They are ugly. And they want to invade your home and feast on your flesh. If this does not work as an allegory for bourgeois attitudes to and fears of the working class, I don't know what does.

But at the same time zombies offer an opportunity for asserting superiority, mastery, contempt, and individuality against the mass. Zombies are slow and stupid. Humans are quick and intelligent. Zombies are limited by their reach. Humans can use all manner of weapons. Provided they are not swarming in great numbers, humans run rings around them - lopping off a limb here, beheading another there, removing their teeth, chaining them up, what fun can be had! And all without a troubled conscience too.

Zombie settings offer a simple fantasy where one can assert the self - sometimes heroically - against the world. You have to beat the undead hordes. Unlike the ever-popular vampires, one cannot join them. Zombies tune into ruling class anxieties and a popular longing for recognition and simplicity. And as long as capitalism blindly lurches from crisis to crisis in the mindless pursuit of profits, so the popularity of the zombie will endure.”

So where does ‘Warm Bodies’ fit into this paradigm? Perhaps inevitably it’s been labelled a ‘zomromcom’. The concept seems like a bad joke, a satire on the Twilight crowd like the atrocious ‘Vampires Suck’. Much of the appeal of this film is curiosity how they can make the bizarre premise of a Romeo and Juliet inspired love story between a zombie boy and a human girl work.

R and Julie (Teresa Palmer)

To my complete surprise this relationship not only works, it works well. ‘Warm Bodies’ doesn’t skimp on the ‘zombie’-ness either. Our hero, ‘R’ (Nicholas Hoult) is a full on rotting shambling corpse. As the film opens he’s just another among an army of undead aimlessly making their way around an abandoned airport. He can just about speak if he concentrates, but can only mutter “hungry” or “eat”. We even get to see him killing a man, cracking his head open and feasting on the goo inside (probably a first for a lead in a romantic comedy).

Fortunately R gets an internal monologue throughout the film allowing him to express himself beyond moans and strangled words. He’s a likeable, pragmatic, wry sort of zombie, aware and importantly, accepting of his situation. In a fantastic opening sequence we see him meandering around the airport he calls home, explaining to us what a day in the life of a zombie is like. Hoult does an outstanding job as R, conveying neither misery nor elation at the life of the undead, but rather a sense of perpetual ennui, unable to communicate, dream or age, slowly rotting into feral oblivion. More impressively, for much the film he tells us all this through groaning and clumsily shrugging his shoulders.

It’s easy to see parallels the film draws between teenage angst and zombiehood, but I think it’s more interesting to view R’s undead nature as a metaphor for mild depression. The way R lonely trudges around a grey world, not caring about anything in particular captures ‘the blues’ perfectly. It’s only when he meets the shotgun wielding Julie (Teresa Palmer) that he begins to regain his humanity, piece by piece. He instantly falls head over heels for her, and without really knowing what or why he’s doing it, rescues her from the other zombies and brings her back to the abandoned plane he calls home. The scenes that follow are the best in the film as we see her terror melt into curiosity and eventually affection.

The first time you see them together, Julie is wide-eyed, panicked with fear at his presence, understandably so: R is shambling, moaning and looks like a corpse, and, in the past, zombies ate her mom. You wonder how the film can possibly going to make this relationship believable. But Hoult plays R with a rock solid devotion to Julie that’s immediately touching. Understandably given their respective situations neither R or Julie are especially extroverted which makes their relationship attractively humble, just two unlikely people randomly thrown together in a mixed-up world.

As the two grow closer to each other R begins to regain his humanity. Some of the grosser elements of his features begin to heal, he’s shocked when he realises he can feel cold and gradually he can speak more clearly. If you think this all sounds a bit cheesy you’re right. It’s literally a straightforward case of ‘love saves the day’, but you know what? Cheesy as it is, it’s cheese that works.

Much of the time ‘Warm Bodies’ doesn’t take itself very seriously; it’s a light-hearted comedy, one that’s not afraid to poke fun at its outlandish premise. So it’s a surprise when the film becomes genuinely moving. There’s a beautiful sequence when a group of zombies see R and Julie holding hands and don’t know quite how to react, followed by scenes where they begin to remember painful glimpses of their former lives. The message that all you need to pull yourself out of mindless zombieism is love and communication is conveyed about as subtly as a shotgun blast to the head, but hell, every other zombie film is a neverending nilhilistic nightmare, why can’t one be sweetly dippy?

More importantly, ‘Warm Bodies’ neatly subverts the themes of the zombie genre, explaining that hard-bitten ruthless individualism is the root of what causes mindless undead monsters in the first place. In pretty much every other piece of zombie media, zombies are mindless human-shaped walking targets, vehicles for people to work out their psychotic impulses on without guilt. This film points out how fucked up those impulses are, explaining that though the rest of the human race might sometimes seem like a mindless, terrifying mass, it’s communication, co-operation and understanding that saves the day, not chainsaws and crowbars.

I enjoyed ‘Warm Bodies’ far more than I expected. My expectations weren’t high, mainly because the marketing campaign is absolutely godawful, but the film won me over almost instantly. If I’d have known it was directed by Jonathan Levine, whose last film was the excellent ‘50/50’, I’d have been more optimistic going in. But ‘Warm Bodies’ is a solid film in practically every regard from start to finish, only wobbling slightly with some dodgy CG characters towards the end. It feels strange saying it, but this zombie film is the perfect Valentine’s date.

****/*****

‘Warm Bodies’ is on general release from the 8^th of February.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

‘I Give It a Year’ (2013) directed by Dan Mazer

Thursday, January 24, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 3 Comments

First impressions aren't great. I’ve got a well developed aversion to the ‘wedding comedy’ genre and if I never see another ‘hilariously’ offensive best man’s speech in a film I may well die happy. I sink down into the cinema seat, wondering why on earth I’d bothered to come out to see what looks like utter dross. Some kind of hi-energy poppy dance number plays over the opening credits. So far, so awful.

The set-up is pretty straightforward, Josh and Nat (Rafe Spall and Rose Byrne) have fallen in love and quickly decide to get married. We open at their extravagant wedding, where older, experienced married couples are looking on suspiciously. One of them cynically mutters “I give it a year”. Soon the newlyweds are at each other’s throats, things that were cute and funny have become exasperating and they’re slowly realising that their lives are quite different. Thrown into the mix are Chloe and Guy (Anna Faris and Simon Baker) who seem to be Josh’s and Nat’s perfect matches. Can the newlyweds resist their respective temptations? Will they learn the lesson that a successful marriage is something you have to work at? Do opposites really attract?

Rafe Spall as Josh and Stephen Merchant as Stephen Merchant. I forget what his character's called. He basically plays himself.

These aren't questions that keep me up at night. But not too far into the film something strange happened, I began to laugh. Make no mistake about it, ‘I Give It a Year’ is not a good film. It's competently but boringly directed, and while it's shot in central London Mazer manages to make everything look very bland. Plot-wise it’s no great shakes either, the first half of the film is a series of tonally inconsistent sketches strung together by a vague narrative.

Despite all this I was surprised to find myself laughing quite a bit. In many ways ‘I Give It a Year’ is a very strange film. Aesthetically it’s the definition of middle-of-the-road, looking like a hundred other romantic comedies. But, crucially, the writing is actually pretty sharp, and you eventually realise that the film is turning into a neat deconstruction of the romantic comedy genre.

On the whole the cast is pretty damn funny as well. Rose Byrne gets the slightly duff end of the stick playing a snooty career woman and even though we’re not strictly supposed to be taking sides it’s easy to find her character far more annoying than Rafe Spall’s Josh, a chilled out, slightly slobby writer. But Byrne does have some decent comedic chops, even as she does end up playing the ‘straight man’ to Spall.

Rose Byrne as Nat

Josh feels like the kind of role that a few years ago could be played by Simon Pegg, and so while Rafe Spall is funny enough, he feels a bit miscast. When Nat says to Josh, “I don’t really ‘do’ good looking” it doesn’t work, Spall is obviously pretty damn handsome, there’s a even few shirtless scenes showing off how well-toned he is. But crucially he's funny, likeable and charming. There's a nub of genuine emotion in his performance, which goes a long way towards making the film work.

As the ‘perfect’ matches for our beleaguered married couple, Simon Baker and Anna Faris are both excellent, although Faris has the edge. The role of Guy, a dashing, humanitarian bleach manufacturer seems to be played more by his smart haircut and a very nice pair of spectacles than the actor himself. Making our alpha male perfect professional a bleach manufacturer is a slightly odd choice, although it does give us an enjoyably weird sequence where he give us a tour of his solvent factory in the Midlands. Anne Faris’ Chloe is far more fun. She suffers slightly from the script repeatedly referring to her as unsexy and plain, which she clearly isn’t. She does get the single best scene of the film though, as she unsuccessfully trying to join in a threesome. She gets repeatedly elbowed out of the way in a scene that gets funnier and more awkward the longer it goes on. It’s got almost zero connection to the wider plot, but it’s funny enough in its own right.

Simon Baker as Guy. Bleach manufacturer and owner of some cool ass glasses.

Filling out the supporting cast are a plethora of British TV comedy actors, ranging from a great but woefully underused Kerry Howard (of Him and Her fame) to a weirdly unfunny Olivia Colman. This is the second film I’ve seen lately where she’s peculiarly off-key, which is confusing because she’s good in pretty much everything else I’ve seen her in.

More than most romantic comedies, ‘I Give it a Year’ is pleasantly realistic about the idea of marriage. Traditionally, weddings are the ‘happy ever after’ climax of romantic films, with the bulk of the story occupied with the relationship up to that point. Here the structure is neatly inverted, with a couple steadily falling out of love with each other throughout the course of the film. The script is full of bullshit advice from characters about the first year being the most difficult, and how to tolerate a relationship fuelled by loathing and resentment. It’s eye-rollingly clichéd stuff with the result that, interestingly, you begin to root for their marriage to fail.

This kind of subversion makes me wonder who is going to watch this film. It’s cynical, darkly comic and at times filthy, with a healthy disregard for convention, but clothed in the genre clichés of a terrible romantic comedy. People going into it expecting a romantic, life-affirming sappy comedy for Valentine’s Day are going to be disappointed, as are those expecting something along the lines of the writer/director’s last films ‘Borat’ and ‘Bruno’. The film exceeded my expectations, although they were rock-bottom. ‘I Give It a Year’ is an interesting experiment and genuinely exciting when it strikes out into unfamiliar territory. But even though it cleverly plays with your expectations, it's too unevenly funny and too stylistically dull to be a genuinely good film.

***/ *****

Thursday, December 20, 2012

'Safety Not Guaranteed' (2012) directed by Colin Trevorrow, 18th December 2012

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'Safety Not Guaranteed' is a mean little tease of a film. It tempts you with all kinds of time travel based shenanigans, for most of the film you feel pretty sure about where this is all going, but then the film takes repeated turns away from what you expect it to be, but ends up in an equally familiar place.

We live in a time where almost anything can be adapted into a film: theme park rides, board games and seemingly every comic-book property under the sun. But the genesis of 'Safety Not Guaranteed' is even more unlikely than these, a classified ad placed in 'Backwoods Home Magazine' in 1997.

This advert eventually took on a life of its own, being the subject of a skit on the Jay Leno Show, and becoming an internet meme in its own right. The concept here is, what if this advert was serious? Darius (Audrey Plaza) is the hero of our story, an unpaid intern working for an upmarket Vice-esque magazine. She, and the geeky Arnau (Karan Soni) are chosen by writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) to come with him on a field trip to investigate the advert and write an article about the guy behind it, who they naturally assume is a crackpot.

Our would-be time traveller is Kenneth (Mark Duplass), and fortunately for Darius, who is told to get to know him, he's not a total psychopath. He's an intense, depressed man who wants to travel back in time to re-unite with his childhood ex-girlfriend. He initially comes across as a harmless nut, but as Darius gets closer to him she's drawn into his world and starts to believe that maybe, just maybe there's a slight chance he could actually travel in time.

Darius (Audrey Plaza) - btw those glasses tell you much of what you need to know about this film

Audrey Plaza does a decent job of showing her gradual thawing out. She begins the film suffering from an undefined and irritatingly vague depressive state, taking a kind of masochistic pleasure in being one of life's punching bags. Plaza is great at this, just one blank, big-eyed incredulous stare from her is enough to tell you all you need to know about her character. She spends much of the first half of the film hunched over in a hoodie, self-defensive to a tee and ready with a barbed comment for anyone that crosses her path. She isn't that likeable, but smartly, the two people she's paired with on this investigation are both annoying in their own ways. The writer, Jeff is a shallow, sex obsessed jock who is using this assignment as an excuse to track down his high school girlfriend and Arnau is a socially crippled, bordlerline autistic nerd. Faced with these unappetising social prospects, Darius' smart-ass, cynical demeanour becomes quickly relatable.

But this Darius' iceberg quickly melts when she meets up with fellow social outsider Kenneth. I've only seen Duplass in one film before this, the so-so 'Your Sister's Sister', and is playing a variation on what seems to be his 'type', namely the slightly rumpled, somewhat slobby but ultimately loveable bachelor. It's not exactly a stretch for him, although to his credit he believably inserts a certain manic layer underneath much of Kenneth's actions. He's paranoid, at times worryingly so, most obviously when he suspects he's being followed and begins threatening an innocent couple with a shotgun. Despite that there are these elements of dangerousness in Duplass' performance, they're quickly glossed over by the film. It is a little odd how quickly Darius falls for a man who lives in a shack in the woods with a large collection of firearms and a predilection for burgling medical facilities.

Kenneth (Mark Duplass)

After these two 'meet cute', they begin to open up to each other and learn that maybe you don't need to go back in time to find happiness, maybe you can find it right here right now. Bleeurgh, vomit-inducingly sweet stuff. And here my problems with the film begin. These characters begin their arcs as broken, just barely functioning people: in other words, they're interesting. As their relationship develops they start to become slightly better adjusted and open up to each other, and the more they do the less interesting they become. Sure, it's uplifting to watch these two lift themselves out of their depressive states, but uplifting in an increasingly dull way.

The film settles into following a well-worn indie romantic comedy groove, with our two oddballs getting to know each other through Kenneth's wacky time travel guerilla training. We see them geekily practicing martial arts on a beach, running through the wood smiling dreamily and (a bit off-puttingly) practising shooting stuff. In the opening act of the film, it seems like it could head into some untrodden ground, even if it was 'just' a mashup of indie romcom and time travel shenanigans, but quickly it settles into following a well-trodden formula pretty rigidly.

Darius, Arnau (Karan Sohi) and Jeff (Jake Johnson)

'Safety Not Guaranteed' never quite lost me, but it came pretty damn close during an excruciating scene where, on a camping trip out in the woods, Kenneth plays Darius a heartfelt song he's written for his lost love. You really want to go here film, fine, I'll tough it out. I braced myself for the inevitable appearance of the beaten up indie romcom acoustic guitar. But what was to come was even worse, Kenneth is too kooky to settle for a guitar, no, he pulls out a fucking zither. As Darius dreamily looks on, her big eyes lit up by the campfire, he proceeds to plink out a horrible, morose, sub-sub-Coldplay zither song.

My eyes widened in horror during this scene at what I was seeing. Not only was the song rubbish, not only was it played on a stupidly pretentious dumb-looking instrument, but the film actually expects to nod our heads sagely and come to the conclusion that under all his oddness and paranoia lies the softly beating heart of a sensitive artist (one whose passion can only really be expressed with a fucking zither*).

I've always held that when you're writing about a film, it's important to write about the film you've seen, rather than the film you wanted to see. But taking that amazing classified advert as a starting point and then making a by-the-numbers quirky indie romcom is a waste of a great concept. Throughout the film they repeatedly set up plot points to be resolved using time travel that just hang in the air as if left over from a previous (and more entertaining) draft of the script. Characters will bemoan their actions from 10 years ago and wish they'd done things differently, with the obvious solution being crazy time travel. It's clumsy exposition, but you can comfort yourself with the idea that the payoff will be worth it. Ultimately there is no payoff. The film even wastes Jeff Garlin on a one scene blink and you'll miss it cameo!

Even more annoyingly, the film ends at the point you feel it should have gotten to at least an hour ago. We watch our characters head off into a far more interesting film leaving us staring at the credits feeling vaguely let down. Perhaps it's a question of personal taste. I've seen a hell of a lot of indie romcoms where two eccentric outsiders connect, and I've also seen a lot of films with bonkers time travel paradox conundrums. I know the general beats of both of these genres, but I'd much rather the film have been more 'Back to the Future' than 'Garden State'.

I find it difficult to disagree with the overall message of 'Safety Not Guaranteed'; namely that travelling back in time to solve your personal problems isn't a mature way to go about things. But the execution is something I've seen many times before with very few surprises. It's nice to finally see Audrey Plaza in a leading role, she's a great actor and makes a difficult character work. Likewise I've got few complaints about Duplass' performance. My problem is that the film wants to subvert audience expectations, which is all well and good, but its idea of subversion is to adopt another equally predictable set of conventions that are pretty dull and played out in 2012.

'Safety Not Guaranteed' is on general release in the UK from 26th December.

*I want to point out here that I have nothing against zithers per se, the soundtrack to 'The Third Man' is awesome, and I'm sure in the right hands zithers are a fine, fine instrument, but still, an acoustic camping zither player is a special kind of tosser. To make things worse I just read this goofs entry on IMDB: "When Kenneth and Darius are at the camp and Darius asks what kind of musical instrument Kenneth has, he responds that the instrument is a zither. The instrument they are using is a mountain, or Appalachian, dulcimer. Mountain dulcimers do fall into the general zither category, but typically when people refer to zithers they mean instruments that have shorter scale lengths and many more strings, or courses, than mountain dulcimers. Calling a dulcimer a zither is like calling a viola or cello a violin simply because they fall into the general "violin family" category." IT’S NOT EVEN A PROPER ZITHER! GAH!

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ (2012) directed by David O. Russell, 18th November 2012

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a film about mental illness. We follow the story of Pat (Bradley Cooper), sufferer of a bipolar disorder. As the film opens he's being released from a state mental institution after serving a sentence for violently beating someone half to death. He suffers from intense mood swings, turning on a knife edge from happy and upbeat to depressive and violent.

David O. Russell has created a film that pulls itself in two directions at once. It’s obviously striving to present an accurate and sympathetic view of various types of mental disorder but is shackled to the conventions of the romantic comedy. These two ‘genres’ (if ‘mental illness film’ is really a genre) sit uneasily together.

Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) and Pat (Bradley Cooper)

The narrative shows us Pat’s attempts to conquer his condition and reintegrate himself into a society that’s suspicious and scared of him. They’re scared of him with good reason though, he lacks a filter on his words and actions, frequently acting inappropriately and with no empathy for how he might come across to others. While he’s constantly feeling some kind of extreme emotion, he entirely lacks the apparatus to identify how he’s affecting those around him. He’ll burst into his parent’s bedroom late at night to rant about Ernest Hemingway and throw a book through the window, or run up and hug a visibly frightened ex-colleague.

Pat is not the most likeable filmic hero. Throughout the film he operates under the illusion that he’s going to get his marriage back together, which everyone around him can immediately tell is not going to happen. People try to let him down gently and get him to see that his wife probably isn’t coming back. He labours under the illusion that their love is unbreakable, even after she’s had an affair and he’s nearly beaten a man to death in front of her.

Pat's parents, Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro)

Into this tangled world comes the equally complicated Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s a recent widow and ever since her husband died has been undergoing an alienating nymphomania. To the obvious disgust and embarrassment of her family she’s been having sex with nearly everybody she comes across. It’s gotten to the point where she’s been fired from her job for sleeping with everyone in the office. So can these two damaged people come together and help each other with their problems?

But it’s not just our two leads that are suffering psychic pains. One of the points the film makes is that the dividing line between those that are diagnosed mentally atypical and those that appear to lead normal lives is blurred. Nearly every character in the film appears to be dealing with some kind of problem, be it an obsessive compulsive disorder, violent fits of rage or a hidden depression. Russell is much more sympathetic to those like Pat and Tiffany who are honest enough to recognise their own problems and has a deep respect for the methods they use to try and fix themselves.

also Chris Tucker is in this film.

Both Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have raging internal storms constantly bubbling behind their performances. They’re portraying people that are not only volatile, but to some degree also have the knowledge that they can ‘get away with it’. The two have both been damaged in some way, so both have an 'excuse' for their actions. One of Cooper’s best tactics is to use his wide, bright blue eyes to show Pat's terrifying clearness and confidence in his actions. The disconnect between how sure he is that his course is the right one and what we in the audience know to be true makes him both tragic and fairly frightening. Cooper is confident in a difficult role, and in less skilled hands runs a risk of losing audience sympathy altogether.

Lawrence is a good match for him, her and Cooper bounce off each other realistically and reflexively. She doesn’t have quite as many emotional gears to shift into as he does, but this is more of a function of her character rather than a limitation in her performance. What she does fantastically is the transformation from reserved, cool and collected to towering, violent, frustrated rage. There’s a physical change that comes over her in one scene that’s a marvel to behold, it’s like suddenly there’s a completely different person that’s sprung out of the character.

The world that these two inhabit is as carefully constructed as the two central characters. Due to their mental states, both Pat and Tiffany live and are dependant on their parents. Russell takes the same kind of downbeat look at working class American life as he did in ‘The Fighter’, although with a slightly softer touch. The film takes place in an overcast suburbia, row after row of identical houses, identical streets and nosy neighbours. This endless downtrodden domestic conformity gets to you after a while, but does the job of making our leads stand out like sore thumbs.

It’s clear that everyone involved here is sincere in making a film that aims to educate us about what it is like suffering from or living with a person with a mental disorder. The characters are treated with nothing but dignity, even in their most unsympathetic moments we at least understand why they are doing what they’re doing. Despite this, the film does use the pretty lame cliche of saying ‘maybe the ones who’ve been diagnosed with mental illness are actually the sane ones?’

This film has genuine flashes of complexity, and when it resorts to cliché like this it falls flat. Russell goes some way to justify this by making nearly every other character in the film a bubbling pit of vague symptoms, but this ends up feeling like a clever way to dodge the point. ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ doesn’t exactly glamorise mental illness, but that fact that it propels the central love story means some of the rough edges are necessarily sanded down.

For the vast majority of the running time ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a downbeat, bittersweet indie drama. The last quarter of the film feels like it’s been parachuted in from a glossy, conventional romantic comedy. Suddenly these damaged characters that we’ve gotten to know are acting relatively normally, and the focus shifts not onto whether they’re healing mentally, but bizarrely, onto their dancing skills. The argument the film puts forward is that their dancing skills are directly linked to their mental health, but after treading so carefully on this territory for the first 90 minutes it becomes very clumsy, very fast.

It’s a let down. We have it impressed upon us that this is an impossibly complex situation with no easy solutions, but the film takes a tonal swerve, shows us that actually there are easy solutions and ties everything up in a neat little bow. A happy ending and roll credits.

Other criticisms include the fact that this film assumes you have a knowledge of American Football, and specifically know a vague history of the Philadelphia Eagles. Characters repeatedly reference events in the history of this team, which may be common knowledge in the US, but I’ve got no idea what the hell they’re talking about and there’s not enough context to figure it out.

The climax of the film involves a ridiculously complex bet on which all the emotional and financial woes of our characters rest. The set up for this bet is one of the most interminable and confusing scenes I’ve seen in a film lately, and assumes you’ve got a knowledge of both American Football and US betting lingo. There’s a protracted negotiation of ‘points’ on a bet and just when this is decided, the characters begin discussing transforming the already complex bet into a parlay (I didn’t know what this was). To be fair they include a clumsy bit of exposition after the scene is over that translates it all into plain English, but it’s too little too late. If the audience is watching the set up to the big climax and they don’t know what the hell anyone is talking about, it saps urgency from the film and replaces it with alienation and confusion.

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ for the most part is an achingly sincere film that clearly cares a great deal about its subject matter. It’s got a solid core of talent and some deftly and sensitively sketched characterisation. But it can’t work out what it wants to be. Does it want to be an serious indie drama about mental illness or a conventional rom-com with two sweet, attractive leads? By trying to do both it doesn’t succeed at either.

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is on general release from 21^st November 2012

LONDON CITY NIGHTS