Tag: bradley cooper

Amazon Prime review: David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012)

Where were you the first time you saw David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook (2012)?

It takes a special film for this critic to remember the answer to that question.

Indeed, how could one forget staring into Bradley Cooper’s star fire-blue eyes and falling in love with the character who marked his metamorphosis into the “serious” dramatist who would go on to give us his A Star Is Born (2018)?

As for Jennifer Lawrence, the audience surrogate reacting to this beauty and charisma she covets for herself even though the gulf between she and Cooper is as tantalizingly close but frustratingly wide as that between the viewer and the silver screen, her dramatic catharsis is communal.

If you don’t know what to watch next, Silver Linings Playbook is available on Amazon Prime. The romantic comedy-drama was adapted by the filmmaker himself from the 2008 novel of the same name by Matthew Quick.

It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with Lawrence winning Best Actress.

Set in Philadelphia, Patrizio “Pat” Solitano, Junior (Best Supporting Actor nominee Cooper), is released into the care of his parents, Patrizio Solitano, Senior (Best Supporting Actor nominee Robert De Niro), and Dolores Solitano (Best Supporting Actress nominee Jacki Weaver).

After spending eight months at a mental health facility for bipolar disorder, Pat attends a dinner party with his friend, Ronnie (John Ortiz), and Ronnie’s wife, Veronica (Julia Stiles), where Pat meets Veronica’s sister, Tiffany Maxwell (Lawrence), a mentally ill young widow.

Tiffany falls for Pat, but Pat is still in love with his ex-wife, Nikki Solitano (Brea Bee), who has taken out a restraining order against him after he beat her extramarital lover, and, so, Tiffany offers to give Nikki a letter from Pat if he agrees to enter a dance competition as her partner.

As one can plainly see from all the acting nods, Russell is an actor’s director. That Silver Linings Playbook is one of only a handful of films in Oscars history to be up for all four acting categories testifies to that.

But Silver Linings Playbook succeeds where, say, American Hustle (2013) fails because it is as narratively tight as it is dramatically fiery, while the overlong American Hustle is bloated with its cast’s improvisational excesses.

And Lawrence is every bit as bright as you would expect her to be. Between this, American Hustle, and Joy (2015), her creative partnership with Russell sings the song of a muse and her artist. Her alchemic transformation into Tiffany is a firework show.

Unfortunately, though, she continues the trend of women with mental illnesses being sensationalized on film. Another Lawrence collaborator, Darren Aronofsky, similarly exploited Natalie Portman in his Black Swan (2010), for which Portman also took home the trophy.

A person’s psycho-emotional suffering shouldn’t be a means to an end for actors looking to make spectacles of themselves.

However, Silver Linings Playbook humanizes Tiffany as a romantic lead, rather than villainizing her a la Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1986). She is no less magnetic than Cooper himself.

The film is miraculous in the romance it electrifies between two people for whom love is more painful than not, a spell only movie magic can cast.

Amazon Prime review: Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” (2018)

“Music is essentially twelve notes between any octave… Twelve notes, and the octave repeats. It’s the same story, told over and over, forever. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those twelve notes.”

Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born (2018) is the third remake of William A. Wellman’s 1937 film of the same title. If you don’t know what to watch next, the musical romantic drama is available on Amazon Prime.

Cooper’s directorial debut was nominated in eight categories at the Ninety-First Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Cooper himself earned nods for his work as lead actor as well as his contribution to the adapted screenplay.

Co-star Lady Gaga (and Best Actress nominee) won Best Original Song for “Shallow.”

It is the story of an alcoholic country musician named Jackson Maine (Cooper) who falls for a waitress named Ally Campana (Gaga) after he sees her deliver an intoxicating cover of “La Vie en rose” at a drag bar.

When Jackson learns Ally has given up on pursuing a career in music because of all the rejection she’s faced, he uses his fame to help her get discovered.

But once Ally’s meteoric rise to success eclipses his own, Jackson’s drinking drags him down to new lows, and threatens to tear down their relationship with it.

As filmmaker, star, co-screenwriter, and co-producer, Cooper runs the risk of Shyamalanian self-indulgence. But with his stringy hair and slurred growl, he paints an unflattering portrait of alcoholism.

Indeed, the most redeeming characteristic about Jackson is how he helps Ally find the happiness she deserves for her talent.

As for Gaga, the focal point in this fairytale of a server who becomes a pop star, she runs the risk of playing herself, which could go one of two ways: chewing the scenery with her outrageous onstage persona; or striking a flat note with a pedestrian performance.

Instead, she harmonizes with Cooper’s mise-en-scene, balancing a melodious complement between “personal” and “transformative” in her characterization of Ally.

The power of the two romantic leads is critical to the chemistry the audience feels between them.

That Cooper could inspire three Oscar-nominated turns in his first project, is testament to his potential as a director – Sam Elliot, who speaks the “twelve notes” line, was nominated for his supporting role as Jackson’s half-brother and manager, Bobby Maine.

The Academy did not recognize Cooper’s directing work, however. It is disappointing that he chose to shoot a fourth A Star Is Born in a market already oversaturated with reboots, remakes, and sequels.

And it is problematic that the poorly aged template for his wish fulfillment fantasy is a love story between a jealous, narcissistic man who forces his partner to be strong enough for both of them and save him from his own self-destruction (when she isn’t using him for her own ambition).

Still, the way Cooper sees “those twelve notes” is as much a cinematic celebration as it is musical.

Matthew Libatique’s award-nominated cinematography frames Jackson and Ally in fluid closeups as intimate as a lover’s gaze, with lens flares as dazzling as the adrenaline rush of falling in love, or watching your dreams come true.

The cheering crowds at their concerts are relegated to background noise for the courtship at the heart of the picture.

Meanwhile, the dance between the movie’s visual and auditory aesthetics is no less charged than one of Jackson and Ally’s duets. Sound mixers Tom Ozanich, Dean A. Zupancic, Jason Ruder, and Steve A. Morrow were among the nominees at the 2019 Oscars ceremony.

The ringing of Jackson’s tinnitus deafens viewers to the music he shares with Ally, the passion she stirs in him even as he drinks himself half to death, and it invites us to live the tragedy of his downfall.

While the ballad of Jackson and Ally is not immune to the remove of critical viewership, it is stylistically self-aware that it is a tale as old as time and a song as old as rhyme.

And so we can be forgiven for enjoying it as something of a love letter to the “twelve notes” that bring two creative souls together in a consummation as intense and brilliant as they are.