Silver Linings Playbook

Yes, that’s a blurry Julia Stiles in the background.

Silver Linings Playbook features more football, dancing and talk of gambling than I expected. It also features less in the way of an in-depth approach to mental illness – certainly less than suggested by the beginning – but is still an open, charming romantic comedy.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) is getting out of an institution at the beginning of the film, to go back and live with his parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert de Niro). His goal is to reconcile with his wife, but along the way he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a recent widow and fellow sufferer of mental illness, who both helps and hinders his progress. Being a David O. Russell movie, the film is generous with all its actors, big parts and small, but the two leads shine the most. All the performances work (though Jacki Weaver’s Australian accent comes through occasionally), but it’s a pleasure to just watch Cooper and Lawrence bounce off each other.

So I enjoyed the film a lot. Maybe not ‘tons of Oscars’ enjoyed, but still. However, I also very much see criticism about the film’s treatment of mental illness. We are told right from the beginning that Pat is bi-polar, and to begin with the film does a good job of showing the difficulties that brings with it. There’s an especially nice moment from when Pat and Tiffany first meet when they discuss different medications they’ve been on, and how they made them feel, a conversation I’m very familiar with. But after the first forty-five minutes or so, they progress from ‘actual’ crazy to ‘movie’ crazy, which is a lot funnier and more cinematic but also a very common cop-out when dealing with such things. So often, mental illness in movies is played as a quirk, and while Silver Linings Playbook doesn’t quite cross that line, it gets much closer to it than it seems like it’s going to from the beginning.

It’s not a bad thing that the film is really just a well-made romantic comedy, but it seems like it could be more than that, one that might manage to take a less romanticised view of what people with mental illness go through, or that love can’t conquer all. As I said, I was charmed, and not offended, and definitely enjoyed it. But instead of staying on the track of being about the intersection of love and craziness, it became about American football. And dancing. And gambling. Which made me a little wistful for what it almost was.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Unexpectedly, and undocumented by many of the major coverage and reviews, Peter Jackson has delivered an extremely successful and entertaining adaptation of The Hobbit.

More on the reception later, because it’s worth dwelling first on the achievements of the film.

It seamlessly picks up the style, imagery and tone of the previous Lord of the Rings films in such a way that it is hard to feel over a decade has passed since The Fellowship of the Ring was first released. Aside from a curiously lumbering prologue that brings us back to Ian Holm’s Bilbo and Elijah Wood’s Frodo, the film picks up once we’re positioned in the time proper of the story. Admittedly, the introduction of the dwarves and their quest – to retake the homeland under the Lonely Mountain – is detailed and thorough, and some may feel too long for what is an adaptation of a short book. But ultimately it’s all necessary, as Jackson knows the relevance and resonance of these early scenes with Bilbo and the dwarves carries and underpins much of the crucial action throughout this film, and will have to do likewise for the coming two films.

This is not a retroactively constructed trilogy, formed out of three spontaneous stand-alone stories. These are thoughtful and considered plot points, made in full awareness of how long the journey will be, and how tedious it can become if it’s all spectacle without character-driven emotion and desire underneath. Much is the same in the original Lord of the Rings films.

The journey itself moves swiftly along, and continues the up-and-down episodic nature of the original novel, but introduces stronger thematic through-lines and overarching conflicts that stitch the episodes together into a continuous dramatic narrative. To be honest, this was something always missing from The Hobbit as a novel. It is a story written for children, in the manner of bed-time tales, which need to be short and almost televisual in the way they deliver a series of ongoing tribulations. Compared to The Lord of the Rings novels, this is a weakness of The Hobbit, and Jackson has improved the source novel immensely with this film.

The special effects will win the Oscar. That’s pretty much a given. Phenomenal.

Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography has never been better. What was so satisfying with this film was that Jackson and Lesnie’s camera allowed the audience time to actually sit in the environments, witness details and characters in wandering close-ups, something that wasn’t there in the original three films. Those had very much the staple of wide shots for new locations, close ups for dramatic moments, and everything else carried in standard mid to full shots. Here the camera is far more inventive and fluid, and it leaves impressions on the viewer more than the earlier films. The best example of this by far is the crucial Riddles in the Dark sequence where Bilbo encounters Gollum. Other moments, such as the flashback to the Battle of Azanulzibar (yeah I looked that up) and the climactic scene where the company fights off Azog and his wargs, are so captivating in the way the camera documents the scenes, that I could rewatch them over and over for all the tiny details included.

So I loved this film. More than I expected to. I expected to enjoy it, and more than some reviews had made out, but also because I didn’t like the book nearly as much as the longer, darker, more structurally sound trilogy. And yet I’d hazard an early stab at saying that I think this film is – as a film – more successful than any of the earlier three. It is, as a fantasy genre film, high above than almost anything else made before, something a lot of reviews are studiously ignoring. It is a testament to Jackson’s ability that these high-fantasy genre films are dissected on a level rarely afforded of the genre.

So why has there been negative coverage of the film’s release? Not to put too much stock in this, but Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 65%, whereas IMDB rates it an 8.3. It has grossed nearly $900 million to date. And it’s only been out a few weeks. Apparently there’s a divide between what critics are saying, and what people actually think.

Many people have lamented the fact that Jackson’s taken one short book and is turning it into a trilogy of films potentially as long as The Lord of the Rings, which was adapted from three very long books.

This is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded. Harsh, but necessary.

Some maths:

The Hobbit – 310 pages.

The Lord of the Rings – 1570 pages.

Brokeback Mountain – 65 pages.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 169 minutes (so far, we don’t know the running time of the next two films, and they could well be shorter).

The Lord of the Rings – 558 minutes.

Brokeback Mountain – 134 minutes.

It is often said short stories adapt best into films. Hitchcock did this often. It is too hard to fit all the detail from a novel into a film. A 310 page novel will always lose detail. Jackson actually had to lose material – and a lot of it – from the original trilogy in order to adapt it into three very long films. What that shows is a mark of his adaptations that the three films are coherent, let alone entertaining. To reduce that volume of pages and detail into just over 9 hours of film is incredible.

We can only speculate how long the total running time of The Hobbit trilogy will be, but what’s become apparent from this first film is that he’s not wanting to leave parts out, and is including parts from other areas of Tolkien’s oeuvre to improve the drama, tone and consistency of the original novel. To make a child’s story into a film faithfully, after adapting the rather adult The Lord of the Rings, would be ridiculous.

Finally, my favourite thing about viewing this film. It seemed clear whilst watching this that Jackson was very careful not to repeat the mistakes of prequels-past, and nullify what was so good about the original films. Additionally, the lengthy preproduction time on this film has served it well in that the story is much more considered than the first three, which had the feel of trying to control a runaway train. Every scene in this film is entertaining in its own right, but also is going to enrich and expand and damn well improve future viewings of The Lord of the Rings. Characters and events get hasty treatment there, and this film has managed to change that and hopefully – when all three are released – allow an extremely pleased viewer the chance to watch six films in chronological sequence and have an experience never put to film before.