Every Silver Lining Has a Dark Cloud

Amazon informs me that Silver Linings Playbook will arrive April 30. I caught this flick, which won Jennifer Lawrence her Oscar, in the theater, but decided to add it to the DVD shelf anyway as something of recent vintage to watch with company. (Many of my visitors who stay for a movie are doubtful about the 40-90 y.o. pics that occupy much of my shelf-space.)

Romantic comedies of the current century rarely succeed both commercially and critically as well as this one. Not everyone liked Silver Linings Playbook, to be sure. Richard Brody in The New Yorker wrote an interesting but idiosyncratic review that was blistering toward the screenplay, though he expressed sympathy for the actors: “In other words, the plot is utterly ridiculous, the characters are created merely to fulfill its requirements, and whatever charm and integrity the movie possesses issues from the actors, who do their damnedest to lend their scriptbots flesh and soul.” Beyond this, he detected a “conservative” world-view in the film that was not to his liking. (I know nothing about the politics or philosophy of writer/director David Russell, but, just by the odds in Hollywood, I suspect this interpretation surprised him.) Overall, though, reviews were glowing, from Roger Ebert at the Sun-Times to Manohla Dargis at The New York Times.

Brody is right about the plot being contrived, but so are the plots of nearly all RomComs. In this one, we see two people with serious but manageable mental illnesses – plus supportive but flawed and stressed-out families – who might just be right for each other.

I side with The New York Times on this one rather than The New Yorker, but the fact that Silver Linings Playbook is a rarity raises a question. RomComs once were a well-liked genre, yet in the past decade few have won as many as three stars on Rotten Tomatoes. What happened? Christopher Orr in The Atlantic addresses this question in an article titled Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad? He laments “the long decline from Katherine Hepburn to Katherine Heigl.” To be fair to Miss Heigl, Hepburn had vastly superior scripts, e.g. Bringing up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. I don’t think the elder Katherine could have done any more than the younger one with Knocked Up or The Ugly Truth. Yet, the question remains: why are today’s scripts inferior? Orr’s thesis is that RomComs rely on couples overcoming obstacles to be together, “but society has spent decades busily uprooting any impediment to the marriage of true minds. Love is increasingly presumed—perhaps in Hollywood most of all—to transcend class, profession, faith, age, race, gender, and (on occasion) marital status.” The rare genre film that succeeds, he suggests, comes up with an obstacle we as viewers are willing to credit, such as the mental issues in Silver Linings Playbook or the age issues (the romantic duo are 12) in Moonrise Kingdom.

There is something to this, but I think something more basic is at work, too. By and large, we 21^st century folk have become much more cynical about the whole idea of romantic love – at least as something other than a fleeting aberration that enters and leaves our lives now and again. It is this cynicism which keeps us from buying into the premises of most modern RomComs; we give a pass to the classic films, which so often ended with a marriage, because “people thought about things differently then.” The declining rate of marriage in real life reflects an increasingly widespread opinion (at least in hetero circles) that no good can come of it. (Not everyone agrees, of course.) Singles are a majority of adults, and most are just fine with that status. This already was an issue for screenwriters in the 90s. In Blast from the Past (1999), a successful RomCom, Alicia Silverstone informs Brendan Fraser, “Marriage bites! ... Everybody knows that. Ask my divorced sisters. Or ask my divorced mom and dad." Brendan doesn’t know that (thereby providing a work-around for the happy ending) because he has been raised with 1962 values.

It’s not just marriage. All forms of long-term coupling face the same image problem. When I saw the adventure film The Avengers in the theater, Scarlett Johansson, as Black Widow, got audience applause for her line, “Love is for children.”

How did we get this way? I don’t pretend to know (though I have some ideas), but it’s hard not to notice. It presents screenwriters with a challenge that only a few overcome. Moonrise Kingdom worked because…well…the protagonists are children. We’ll buy Silver Linings Playbook because they’re crazy. Either of those conditions could account for it. But without extreme explanations we are skeptical.