About love, pain, reinvention
By Steven Rea
FILM: Silver Linings Playbook
CAST: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Anupam Kher
DIRECTION: David O Russell.
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence (who won the best actress Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards for her role in this film) do a lot of running in Silver Linings Playbook. They crash into each other on leafy suburban Philadelphia streets, out for their morning laps, their evening laps, huffing, puffing, jostling, fighting.
They’re trying to shed weight, these two. Not physical weight (although Cooper’s character complains his meds are making him fat), but the burdens they’re carrying around in their heads. Pat Solitano (Cooper, in an amazingly fierce, funny performance) and his uninvited tagalong, Tiffany, are damaged goods.
A head-spinning wonder of a movie about love, pain, reinvention, rehabilitation and the totemic power of a National Football League franchise, Silver Linings Playbook is, without doubt, a transcendent endeavour, from its exhilaratingly smart screenplay - director David O Russell’s adaptation of the novel by Matthew Quick - to the unexpected and moving turns of its two leads. And from everybody else (Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker and Anupam Kher) in its remarkable cast.
It’s comic, it’s tragic, it dives into a world wholly recognisable, and it springs from a great Hollywood tradition: the storm-tossed romance. Boy meets girl, boy and girl are separated by momentous conflict, boy and girl overcome obstacles to get together and live happily ever after ... or do they?
Pat Solitano is a high school teacher who, in the opening of Silver Linings Playbook, is just out from eight months in a Baltimore psych ward. He found his wife with another guy, he lost it - and then he lost his job. So it’s home to his parents’ house - Pat Sr (De Niro, doing his best work in years) and Dolores (Weaver), a couple whose world turns on Andy Reid and the Philadelphia Eagles. On game days, Pat Sr sits at the TV (he’s barred from attending the games; that’s another story), his Eagles kerchief folded just so, wearing his Eagles sweater, betting big money on his team.
Eagles fever has rubbed off on his son - how could it not? So has a certain manic temperament. Pat Jr, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, reports to his therapist’s office (the wonderfully wry Kher), hears Stevie Wonder crooning My Cherie Amour, and goes ballistic. That was their song - Pat and his wife, Nikki. And now he’s got a restraining order - he can’t be within 500 feet of her. The song is a trigger. There are plenty of others.
And then, at a dinner, Pat meets Tiffany. She, too, can rattle off a list of SSRIs and their respective side effects. She, like Pat, is functioning (just) - and functioning without filters. She’ll say what’s on her mind, no matter how wildly inappropriate or impolitic.
Pat and Tiffany seem destined for each other - except that Pat wants nothing more than to reconcile with Nikki, the love of his life. And Tiffany has her own issues: She’s a young widow, she suffers from depression and low self-esteem. And so the courtship begins.
Russell surveyed the crazy tumult of another fractious family in The Fighter, and he excels at wrangling large casts into tight, propulsive story lines (I Huckabees, Three Kings). The dialogue here ricochets. The emotions hit you sideways. And the specificity of the environment these characters inhabit - like the Boston boroughs the folks in The Fighter hailed from - adds depth and dimension
By the time she’s persuaded him to be her partner in a dance competition, and they’re at her place rehearsing moves to the croon of Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country Fair, we’re completely on their side. These two wackos need each other, and we need them to realise that fact.- The Philadelphia Inquirer
Bill Murray shines as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson
By Kenneth Turan
FILM: Hyde Park on Hudson
CAST: Laura Linney, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Samuel West
DIRECTION: Roger Michell
When Ronald Reagan was asked, as he periodically was, whether his experience as an actor had helped him to be an effective president, he’d genially respond that he didn’t know how anybody could do the job without having been an actor. He was, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon believes, kidding on the square, and Hyde Park on Hudson amusingly demonstrates how important performance was for another head of state.
Though Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln is the presidential presentation of the moment, Bill Murray as Franklin Delano Roosevelt is well worth paying attention to. His FDR beautifully conveys the notion of the chief executive as seductive star performer, a man who counted on his ever-appealing charm to get his way in matters both personal and professional.
As written by playwright Richard Nelson and directed by the expert Roger Michell, Hyde Park tries to blend two quite different stories linked by Roosevelt’s magnetic personality and the vacation White House he maintained on his family’s estate at Hyde Park on Hudson in upstate New York.
The first story involves FDR’s close relationship with his distant cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, played by Laura Linney. The second focuses on a crucial state visit paid to Hyde Park in June 1939 by England’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
This combination has its problematic moments, but you rarely notice them because of the great and diverting skill with which Hyde Park has been made.
Roger Michell has made some of the most entertaining British films of the past 20 years, including Notting Hill, Venus and Persuasion. He makes literate films, small-scale chamber pieces with a sly sense of humour that invariably feature fine performances by accomplished actors.
Though he has competition, especially from the folks playing the visiting royals, Murray is very much the reason to see Hyde Park. His Roosevelt comes alive in both serious and frivolous moments in a convincing way, dominating every room he’s in with his chipper personality and cat-who’s-eaten-the-canary grin despite the polio that has denied him the use of his legs.
For Daisy Suckley, Roosevelt is a distant star she never hoped to approach. But when FDR’s mother was searching around for someone family and local to help the great man “take his mind off his work”, it was Daisy who got the call.
Daisy fears she will be too boring for FDR, but thrilling is not what he is looking for in a companion. Rather, he seeks someone he can relax with and, as she discovers, help him to “forget the weight of the world”.
The evidence of Daisy’s close connection with FDR came from a cache of letters and a diary found in a small suitcase under her bed after she died in 1991 at age 99.
Though Daisy’s awe of FDR and her worshipful demeanour toward the great man may be true to life, these sentiments hang around for too long to be dramatically involving. Even Linney’s great gifts as an actress and some twists in the plot aren’t enough to make this character compelling.
Helping to take up the slack are the other women in the president’s life, all elegantly played and each one livelier than the next.
Still, even with all this going on, Hyde Park on Hudson welcomes the arrival of King George VI and his queen (the same couple who were the focus of The King’s Speech). It’s not just that Samuel West (whose film credits go all the way back to Howards End) as Bertie and Olivia Colman as Elizabeth are such practiced performers, it’s that the stakes in this particular encounter are considerably higher than the strictly personal ones of the Daisy relationship.
For everyone is aware that though the mood in America is isolationist, Britain is in desperate need of aid as war looms in Europe because, as FDR says, “if we don’t help, there won’t be an England for him to be the king of.”. — Los Angeles Times
A damp squib/By Peter Bradshaw
FILM: Gambit
CAST: Alan Rickman, Anna Skellern, Cameron Diaz, Cloris Leachman, Colin Firth
DIRECTION: Michael Hoffman
I have had paper cuts on the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger less painful and more rewarding than this: an agonisingly pointless remake of the 1960s heist caper that starred Michael Caine and Shirley Maclaine.
Michael Hoffman, the formidable filmmaker responsible for The Last Station, directs. And Joel and Ethan Coen have written the script, to which the only rational response is to shout the single word: “Why?” Their interest in remaking the Ealing classic The Ladykillers in 2004 was a bit baffling but the result did at least have some kind of distinctive writerly flavour. This, however, just looks like the Coens have taken a holiday from trying their hardest and doing their best.
Colin Firth plays Harry Deane, an “art curator” who supervises the fabulous collection belonging to a haughty and horrible businessman called Lionel Shahbandar (a mugging, grimacing Alan Rickman). Sick of being bullied by his boss, Harry decides to sting Shahbandar by getting his old buddy and talented pasticheur Wingate (Tom Courtenay) to fake a “lost” Monet believed to be somewhere in the US, stage a phoney discovery and then persuade Shahbandar to buy it.
For this, he needs the help of a feisty blond Texas gal, played on Westworld-autopilot by Cameron Diaz.
Firth reprises his lovably stuffy-uptight routine, although surely he could have told the Coens that no English person uses the word “math”. Firth also makes some attempts at big Clouseauesque physical comedy, which are game enough but don’t come off. The plotting is a damp squib, with laugh-free scenes and setpieces that don’t go anywhere. An awful lot of talent has been put to waste here.- Guardian News and Media
(DVDs courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha)