→ March 12, 2013
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Blood, Bones & Butter.

A little admin stuff first – my new weekly podcast for ESPN, Behind the Dish, debuted today, featuring an interview with Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and a conversation with fellow writer Joe Sheehan. I appreciate the support of all of you who listened to Baseball Today and mourned its end, so I hope you’ll tune in to the new show. It should be up on iTunes today (there’s a technical problem on their end, I’m told). Spread the word.

Also, I have new posts for Insiders on Jeff Samardzija, David Holmberg, and other Cubs and Dbacks and on Yordano Ventura, Brandon Belt, Tyler Skaggs, and more.

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Gabrielle Hamilton is a self-taught and, in her words, “reluctant,” chef who achieved great acclaim for her tiny New York restaurant Prune and the honest, rustic fare she has served there for the past fourteen years, eventually winning the James Beard Award as NYC’s best chef in 2001. Her brilliantly written memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is a masterpiece of the memoir genre, a perfect emulsion of food writing and autobiography that will make your mouth water with descriptions of food yet never shies away from critical introspection.

One central thread, Hamilton’s own relationship with food and, by extension, how much that relationship tied to her relationships with friends and family, runs through the entire book, but rather than giving a single story, Hamilton splits her memoir into a sort of triptych: one section on her childhood and adolescence, one on her stop-and-go path into a career in food (with a detour to Michigan for a master’s in creative writing), and one on her unfulfilling marriage to an Italian doctor, Michele. Food is everywhere in the book, yet the book isn’t about food. It is about Hamilton’s peculiar life, with her passion for cooking a recurring character in every episode.

Hamilton’s path to culinary stardom was accidental, but also extremely odd, not something you’d ever recommend to a would-be chef. Her offbeat family imploded when her French-born mother suddenly demanded a divorce from Gabrielle’s set-designer/artist father, ushering in a period when Gabrielle was largely left without parental supervision, a tragicomic setup that led her both into the kind of libertine behavior you’d expect from a 13-year-old without adults around and into a lifetime of extreme self-reliance. She began working in restaurants and bars, as a dishwasher or a server, and eventually working insane hours for catering outfits in New York, learning how to cook as she went rather than at culinary school. Her disdain for fussy, pretentious food gives her an opportunity for some hilarious rants; her own culinary ethos is about as far from a “chef’s tasting menu” as you can get. Instead, she waxes more romantic when describing an Italian sandwich she purchased at a pork shop in Brooklyn (unnamed, sadly) or the fresh seasonal vegetables she finds during annual visits to her mother-in-law in Rome and Puglia. Even in the final section, which details her latent disaffection with her marriage, one that wasn’t founded on love and never grew into anything more than friendly co-parenting, Hamilton still uses food as the foundation for the exploration of her own emotions.

While Hamilton infuses nearly every page with her passion for food, it’s her clear yet highly evocative writing style that sets Blood, Bones & Butter apart. She can express so much in just a few sentences, as in this passage, describing the scene at a coffee place in Grand Central Station:

I hate hating women but double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrasses me. I ordered a plain filtered coffee, as if I were apologizing on behalf of my gender, and when I dug through my heavy purse to pay for it I discovered in my bag a diaper, a resealable jar of apricot puree, and one of Marco’s socks, which had somehow in the general loss of boundary and private real estate that is Motherhood, made its way in there.

That second sentence there is a thing of beauty, its odd punctuation contributing to its sense of barely contained chaos, all while we get Hamilton’s scorn for overly prissy fake coffee drinks and her exasperation at the loss of self that comes with the addition of one or more kids. When Hamilton describes her experiences in catering kitchens, or takes you through Michele’s family estate in Italy, or talks about the large family meals that bookend the story – the giant lamb roasts her father organized when she was a kid, and the family meal with her now ex-in-laws that appears in the epilogue-cum-“reader’s guide” – you can hear the sizzle of the meat as it cooks. If she’s as good of a chef as she is of a writer, Prune must be amazing.

One stray thought on the book: in a passage about women’s roles and struggles in a professional kitchen, Hamilton offers this thought:

If anything, I have come to love the men who also feel that the kitchen is abetter place when women are allowed to work in it, the men who feel that if any part of society is abused, that it demeans the rest of society.

Emphasis mine there, because that summarizes quite nicely why I will block people on Twitter who use the r-word, or a gay-bashing epithet like the word for a bundle of sticks, and it explains why I find team nicknames like Indians or Braves or that odious one that plays football in Washington so offensive. Intent to demean is not required for something to demean. Simply creating a division that sets one part of the population as “other” is demeaning. We do not name sports teams after Italians or Jews or African-Americans, after lesbians or Sikhs or the disabled, yet we think nothing of naming sports teams after Native Americans, or using words that are obvious proxies for them. (Would you see the implicit racism in a sports team called the Atlanta Slaves?) Hamilton’s praise for men who want women in their kitchens and treated as equals says much about her character, and what kind of co-worker and boss she must be, especially in an industry that often adulates alpha males with domineering personalities.

Next up: Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians, which I reviewed that August.

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→ February 17, 2013
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Les Misérables (film).

The 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables has been savaged by some critics, and even its positive reviews were often less than glowing, but I don’t get it at all. It’s the wildly successful and very well-received stage musical, on the big screen, with real settings and backdrops, and great performances of great songs. (Roger Ebert seemed to dislike the movie in part because it’s not a faithful adaptation of the book, but that was never the intent – it’s an adaptation of the musical, an almost straight one with one short song added and virtually nothing else.) Musicals are not to everyone’s tastes, and you have to enter them willing to have people sing much or all of their dialogue at you for two-plus hours, but if you respect the musical film as its own art form, Les Misérables is among the best.

I have seen the musical, twice, the last time in 1993, and enjoyed it tremendously. The show opened in London in 1985 to generally negative reviews, and 27 years later is still playing in the West End, with the show set to return to Broadway next year for its third run on top of the over 7000 performances already enacted. It won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, when it debuted in 1987. And, in my experience, it’s one of the great “love-to-hate” works in the creative arts of my lifetime, where there’s a certain inexplicable pride in disliking something so popular. I’m not in that camp; despite the two-decade gap, I still remembered all of the songs and probably half of the words. But I liked the music, and like it even more today because it has a veneer of nostalgia for me; if you don’t like the music, you’re going to really dislike the film – and the play.

The story centers on the French convict Jean Valjean, who did 19 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread and evading arrest. He gains his freedom at the start of the film, undergoes a transformation when a priest takes pity on him, and devotes his life to doing good for the less fortunate, becoming a successful businessman who employs many workers from the margins of French society. He encounters a prostitute, Fantine, who is ill and being harassed by a john; when Valjean discovers that Fantine was sacked from his factory, he resolves to help her and to raise her daughter, Cosette, who is in the “care” of the comically crooked Thenardiers. Through each stage of Valjean’s life, he is pursued by the policeman Javert, a cold, heartless man who sees no room for mercy within the law, a pursuit that repeatedly puts Valjean into situations where he must choose between sacrifice and self-preservation. The film’s climax revolves around the failed student revolutions of 1832, where the teenaged Cosette falls in love with the student leader Marius, who is friendly with the Thenardiers’ daughter, Eponine; her love for Marius remains unrequited as the tables from her childhood are turned. The ill-fated revolution puts Marius in harm’s way, during which Valjean manages to save him and have one final encounter with Javert.

Director Tom Hooper made the semi-controversial decision to have his actors sing live on the set rather than dubbing studio versions of the songs on to the film afterwards, but the move gives the film a tremendous rawness suited to the time and themes of the movie, and also avoids the always-jarring shift from live audio to studio recordings. (They do this at least once an episode on Top Chef with Padma, and it always sounds wrong.) The move also allows Hugh Jackman to show off an immense singing voice in a performance that could have carried the movie on its own; while Daniel Day-Lewis is considered the lock for Best Actor for Lincoln, I don’t think his role was as difficult as Jackman’s nor was his performance as huge. Les Misérables is over the top, by design, and Jackman has to fill space to meet those requirements. He does, without fail, aging 20 years from the movie’s start to finish while his character undergoes the most significant changes of any in the film.

Anne Hathaway has received much-deserved praise for her turn as Fantine in a supporting role – she’s dead before the halfway point, sorry – and a performance of the musical’s best-known song, “I Dreamed a Dream,” that should leave audiences in the fetal position. (You might also know that song as the coming-out tune for the Scottish singer Susan Boyle.) Hathaway’s was just the most notable of several supporting performances in Les Misérables, however, as the narrative seems to have focused on her and Jackman while ripping Russell Crowe (more on him in a moment) and ignoring everyone else. Helena Bonham-Carter appears as herself Mme. Thenardier, with Sacha Baron Cohen as her husband and the two of them chewing the scenery as the film’s main comic relief, the thieving, amoral, unhygienic inkeepers who scheme right up to the end of the film. Eponine, whose “On My Own” is another heartbreaking ballad (it’s actually a pretty tragic story for most of the characters), gets a tremendous rendition by the Manx singer Samantha Barks in her first film role, although she’d played the character on the stage for several months before the film was made. TV actor Aaron Tveit usurps Marius (played by Eddie Redmayne) in several scenes as the even more fervent revolutionary Enjolras, with Tveit commanding the camera more easily despite the same silly foppish hairstyle as his fellow tourists.

Crowe has been hammered for his mediocre singing in the film, somewhat unfairly – he’s the worst, yes, because someone has to be, but his poor singing didn’t detract from the film at all, and his performance as Javert was cold because Javert is cold, a pre-Terminator of sorts who sees only black and white. I thought Amanda Seyfried, while as pretty as ever, was just as weak a link and also not a particularly strong singer, but she’s received none of the same wrath as far as I can see. Cosette is the worst-written of the major characters in the musical as well – Eponine, as the tragic figure, is much more interesting and gets that one knockout song, while Cosette just flutters along, gets the boy she wants, and they live happily ever after.

Seeing the stage musical brought to life with real sets and closer views of the action was a thrill, since I saw the play from the cheap seats, but the cinematography in the film version was a real weakness, remarked on even in many positive reviews I’ve seen. I noticed it most during two of the film’s chase sequences involving Javert and Valjean, as well as the advance of the French soldiers when they begin their assault on the student barricades – the camerawork was shaky, uneven, and often angled oddly, while we are treated to far more closeups than we ever needed, especially of wide-open mouths going all fortissimo on us. That said, Hooper and company were up to the challenge of presenting ensemble numbers sung by characters in different locations, easy to do on the stage (you only have so much room) but harder on film, such as in “One Day More,” which could easily become a confused mess but holds together just enough to get us to the finish.

What may bother critics who disliked the film is its inherent populist feel. The songs are all written to move the viewer emotionally – tragic numbers, rousing numbers, comic numbers, even the cloying “Castle on a Cloud” sung by the neglected child Cosette. The story has a strong theme of redemption, with many references to God and religion, as did the original novel, with attendant themes of charity, equality, and respect for one’s fellow man (and woman), along with condemnation of the abuse of authority, of justice without mercy, and of concentration of power. The film wants you to feel something, lots of somethings, but so did Hugo, even if he did it without soaring harmonies and repeated melody lines. It’s neither right- nor left-wing, but it is pointed, and mixes hope with tragedy in unequal portions. You’ll have a song or two (or five) stuck in your head, but I think Jackman’s performance alone will prove just as memorable, as will the film as a whole.

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That concludes my run through the Best Picture nominees, as I’ve seen all but Amour and am choosing to skip that one. It has no chance to win, apparently, but I’d still vote for Zero Dark Thirty for Best Picture, with Ang Lee my choice for Best Director for Life of Pi. I have only seen three nominees in each of the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories, but I’d vote for Jackman and Hathaway, respectively. I’m hoping to see at least one or two more nominated performances before the awards are handed out next Sunday.

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→ February 16, 2013
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The Machine.

I broke two of my reading guidelines when tackling Joe Posnanski’s The Machine, his 20010 book about the remarkable 1975 Cincinnati Reds, focusing on their larger-than-life personalities as much as he does on the way they steamrolled through the National League. The first rule is that I almost never read baseball books. Baseball is work; reading is pleasure. When work invades pleasure, it becomes work. So I keep them separate as much as possible. The second rule is that I try not to read books written by people I know, especially if I count them as friends (as I do Joe), because then if I don’t like the book, I am faced with the difficult task of keeping my mouth shut, which, as many of you surely realize, is not something at which I am particularly skilled.

The good news is that I liked The Machine quite a bit – not as much as I loved The Soul of Baseball, which isn’t really a baseball book anyway, just a book about some people who played the game, but that’s an absurdly high standard. I won’t pretend to give The Machine an objective review, so I’ll focus on why I would recommend it.

I turned two during the 1975 season and have no memories of the Big Red Machine other than my parents telling me about those teams (including their dismantling of the Yankees in the 1976 World Series) when I was first becoming a baseball fan about five or six years later. Posnanski does a good job of keeping readers in the flow of the season, which started slowly for the Reds but turned into a romp that didn’t end until they faced the Red Sox in October, while also weaving in short but telling anecdotes about the team’s central personalities – primarily Rose, Anderson, Morgan, and Bench, and if you need their first names, well, you’re probably not the target audience here anyway.

Posnanski does a good job of humanizing Rose and Morgan, both of whom needed it for obvious yet totally unrelated reasons, while somewhat demythologizing Johnny Bench, who was one of baseball’s last true Hollywood stars, although he’s now better remembered for Krylon commercials and his gigantic hands. (Truckasaurus.) Rose doesn’t come off as sympathetic, just as pathologically driven; you won’t forgive his transgressions, but you can at least somewhat understand how he reached that bottom. Morgan, meanwhile, comes off as the cerebral player we all thought he was, given his stat lines, but that he did his best as an announcer to convince us that he wasn’t. (Disclaimer: I’ve never met Joe Morgan, and have no idea what he’s like as a person or as a student of the game.) Anderson, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Ken Griffey (Sr.) don’t get quite the same treatment, although I found the quiet rage of Griffey, still evident in contemporary quotes within the book, more reminiscent of Barry Bonds than of Ken Griffey, Jr., who had more of a reputation in baseball circles as an idler and a bit of a diva.

The Machine kicks into high gear at the end of the book when the nobody-respects-us Red Sox reach the Series and finally give the Reds the test they didn’t have all season. Those games were dramatic and come off as such on the pages, especially the epic Game 6, which Posnanski evokes through quotes and stories, including Rose’s boundless enthusiasm for what he correctly identified at the time as one of the greatest games in baseball history.

Posnanski mentions the team’s ethnic makeup and players’ obliviousness to it a few times during the book, but I wonder if that was truly a coming of age for MLB players post-Civil Rights Movement or just a function of winning breeding good chemistry. Was it unusual at the time to have a lineup – and the book is mostly about the lineup – that was so racially balanced? Did contemporary news sources see it as a big deal? In 1960, it would have been, and in 1980 it would scarcely have been noticed. I don’t know where 1975 fell on that continuum.

Posnanski’s writing has always spoken to me and, as you’d expect, the book absolutely flies – I knocked it off on a weekend trip to LA earlier this month. The friend who gave me this as a gift made a damn good call.

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→ January 29, 2013
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Safety Not Guaranteed.

The 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed takes a famous ad from someone looking for a companion on a time-travel expedition – claiming he’s “only” done it once before – and builds it into a cute, clever story about quirky characters in search of something more than what they’ve gotten out of life, all for different yet interconnected reasons. At about 80 minutes of actual content, it’s briskly paced with smart and witty dialogue, and sets up so well that the ultimate question of whether the time travelers actually travel in time becomes irrelevant. Call it a movie rule: If the story is crafted properly, and the characters are well developed, then the film’s ending doesn’t matter.

(UPDATE: It’s the iTunes $0.99 Movie of the Week as an HD rental. So you really have no excuse.)

Safety stars Aubrey Plaza, better known as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, as Darius, a recent college graduate in an unglamorous, unpaid internship for an alternative weekly paper in Seattle. Bored with basically everything life has thrown her and in a persistent depression since her mom died eight years earlier, Darius volunteers to go with the cocky staff writer Jeff to investigate the man behind the time-travel ad (which, in reality, appeared in Backwoods Home magazine in 1997 as a joke by a staff member), with Jeff figuring he’ll get a portrait of a harmless crazy person … except that Jeff really just wants to go hook up with an old girlfriend, with Darius and fellow intern Arnau, the film’s one stock character, doing all of the work.

The man who placed the ad, Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass, turns out to be completely earnest about the endeavor, definitely harmless, mostly a goofball, but also quite real – at home with his weirdness, with one exception I won’t spoil, totally focussed on this time-travel project so he can go back and prevent one thing from happening. He’s living in the present so that he can relive the past, with an intensity that resonates with the aimless Darius, who poses as a potential partner for Kenneth, going through “training” with him while Jeff hooks up with his ex and Arnau … does nothing all day, apparently, because they never finished writing his character.

Duplass’ character should be the centerpiece as the amiable dork whose passion for his project just sucks you into the story, but Plaza owns every scene she’s in, especially the ones she shares with Duplass, where she plays a character within a character, trying to manipulate Kenneth just to the point where he’ll accept her as a potential partner, but never with the contempt Jeff shows in his own abortive attempts to get the gig. Plaza’s character on Parks has morphed from the satiricial I-hate-everything girl to a more nuanced, more conflicted I-hate-that-I-like-things woman (and wife!) who appears to be hiding her inner Darius – a woman looking to just enjoy the present instead of feeling like the time is out of joint. April pretends she’s not sweet; Darius is sweet (but not saccharine) and wants someone, the right someone, to notice it. Kenneth is a little slow on the uptake there, since he is pretty locked in to the whole time-travel thing, but their relationship feels far more organic for how slowly it develops.

Duplass delivers a strong showing as Kenneth, playing the goofball as a serious goofball, not a wacko or a mentally ill or unstable person, just someone who’s looking backwards because what he sees forwards doesn’t give him much hope. Jake Johnson is appropriately annoying as the man-child Jeff, himself still unable to let go of a failed, long-dead relationship, yet aware enough of it that he can counsel Darius and especially Arnau to enjoy their early-20s primes. Both men are having midlife crises that don’t involve buying Porsches (which they can’t afford) or leaving wives (which they don’t have), instead doing, well, other somewhat stupid things, or doing smart things and screwing them up because they haven’t grown up enough yet. Arnau’s subplot is the one thread that comes through as an afterthought, and his best part in the film is his reaction in the final scene.

The conclusion is ambiguous, because Derek Connolly’s script handles the the Kenneth and Darius storyline so well that it doesn’t actually matter whether they get to travel back in time. Connolly even manages to sidestep the myriad reasons why time travel is impossible, simply having Kenneth treat it as real and moving forward from there, with its feasibility tangential to the main plot. He also granted Darius most of the film’s great lines, largely in response to Kenneth’s sincere nuttiness, with their dialogues, unusually thoughtful and long for a contemporary film, making up most of Safety Not Guaranteed‘s best moments. The movie only showed on a few hundred screens last year – I’m not even sure where it played near me, or exactly when – and made just over $4 million at the box office, which is a shame given how sweet and funny it is, without ever talking down to us (except with Arnau, a little). Perhaps it’s Aubrey Plaza’s curse to star in great vehicles that mainstream audiences just don’t watch.

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→ January 27, 2013
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Life of Pi.

Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi was 97th on the last ranking I did of my top 100 novels, a brilliant book that employs multiple literary techniques to tell a story that may or not be a powerful fable, or a commentary on the enduring nature of faith, or a testament to our capacity to handle tragedy and face unimaginable adversity. Or maybe none of the above. It also seemed like the story itself was written to be adapted into a movie, yet its details would make it almost impossible to film.

Computer graphics software has advanced so quickly in the ten years since the book was released that Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) managed not just to film the book, but to do so without making any major modifications to or sacrifices from the original text. The film is wonderful because the book is wonderful; the film is gorgeous because of Lee, and because of technology, but it’s a great film because of the strength of the underlying story and the performance of Suraj Sharma, who plays the teenaged Pi.

The story of Pi, born Piscine Molitor Patel, begins in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs the local zoo, as a business rather than for any affection for the animals. Pi’s given name causes him obvious problems at school, after which he adopts the nickname “Pi” while also developing an affinity for the number itself. The same exploratory spirit leads Pi, raised in the Hindu tradition by his mother, to also follow Christianity and Islam, something given longer treatment in the book, with more humor involved as well; in the film, it’s primarily a source of strife between Pi and his secular father. Pi and his father also clash over the zoo’s recent acquisition, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, which Pi views as a fellow creature with a soul but Pi’s father sees as a soulless carnivore that would eat Pi as soon as look at him.

When economic and political circumstances in India change, Pi’s father decides to sell the zoo’s animals to North American zoos and move the family to Canada, booking passage for all of them on a Japanese freighter across the Pacific. In a massive thunderstorm, the freighter sinks, leaving Pi alone on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and Richard Parker, beginning a 227-day odyssey of survival on the ocean where Richard Parker, having dispatched the other three non-human passengers on their modest vessel, and Pi eventually come to a detente, albeit one where Pi does all the work in exchange for what may be a tacit agreement that Richard Parker will not eat him. They eventually encounter a mysterious floating island before eventually hitting the shore of Mexico, after which Pi tells his story to the Japanese insurance company investigators who want to know why the ship sank.

The film’s biggest change from the book is a narrative device that has the adult Pi telling his life story to an unnamed writer who was sent to Pi by Pi’s uncle, who said that the writer would hear a story that would make him believe in God. Pi is lightly dismissive of the promise, but tells his story just the same, with quite limited narration overall, as Lee lets the bulk of the story on the lifeboat unfold on its own.

That decision means that Sharma must carry a large portion of the film by himself, with no interaction with another human (and, to be fair, not even with another creature, as nearly all of the tiger’s scenes involve a CG version, not a real feline). His performance is remarkable as he must convince us he’s resourceful, terrified, grieving, and devious, without the benefit of real dialogue, although Pi does attempt to engage Richard Parker in conversation on a few occasions. The only real help Sharma receives is from the stunning visuals in the film, mostly wide shots of the open ocean, as well as two significant storms and the aforementioned island that stands as one of the most incredible aspects of Pi’s story. I saw Life of Pi in 3-D, which usually seems to me as more gimmicky than useful, but Lee made excellent use of it to convey Pi’s isolation on the open water or the sheer size of the sinking freighter, only engaging in a little special effects-turbation as he does when a whale flips over Pi’s boat (which was actually pretty cool, just not entirely necessary).

The film ends with a twist as the adult Pi concludes his story, one taken directly from the book as well that casts some doubt on what Pi’s tale actually means, and what Martel may have been trying to tell us, if anything at all. I thought the novel was a touch more ambiguous, but the film’s conclusion has the same effect of opening up a panoply of questions not just about what’s in the film, but about the nature of faith, of human psychology, of evil, and the nature of truth. Pi is a classic, if flawed, hero, whose emotional maturation over the 227 days sits in inverse proportion to his physical deterioration due to exposure and malnutrition. He speaks to the Writer, and the audience, with the wisdom of a teacher, but a teacher who is wise from experience, not just because he has a foreign accent. Lee’s use of this device to replace the first-person narration of the book might be the best decision he made on the film, one of many good choices from casting to effects to angles that bring us into the lifeboat between man and tiger that make his work here as good as any director’s in 2012 except Kathryn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty.

If you haven’t read Life of Pi, I’d recommend doing that before or after seeing the film, as it’s a quick and totally engrossing read that gives a little more depth to portion of the story that comes before the lifeboat, and also spends more time following Pi’s survival planning in his first few weeks alone. The film may have dragged for me in the middle just because I knew almost everything that was to come, but I still enjoyed the craftsmanship in it, including Sharma’s performance.

This is the sixth Best Picture nominee I’ve seen, and I’d place it clearly behind Zero Dark Thirty but comfortably above Silver Linings Playbook (fifth) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (last). I’d also favor Lee over the directors of those latter two films for Best Director, but haven’t seen Lincoln (yet) or Amour (might skip that one entirely). Life of Pi will probably crush a few of the technical awards, but the absence of Sharma from the Best Actor category is disappointing, given how strong his work was and how much the film depended on him to perform at that level. I’ve only seen one of the five films represented in the Best Actor category, though, so I can’t say whether he was jobbed or just squeezed out in a strong year.

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→ January 16, 2013
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Zero Dark Thirty.

The wildly overblown controversy over torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty has, unfortunately, taken over much of the discussion about the film itself, which is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship that takes a script (by Mark Boal) with a barebones plot and an ending that everyone in the audience already knows and turns it into a gripping account of a manhunt and for a government’s willingness to let one end justify many sordid means.

The film itself unfolds like a series rather than a single movie, almost like the kind of multi-episode story arc you’d find on British television over a full season of 240 minutes. Zero Dark Thirty compresses its story into about 135 minutes, the last third dedicated to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, with the first third melding the needle-in-a-haystack search for information with various Islamic terrorist attacks on the west and some unstinting depictions of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” generally known by people with functioning brains as “torture,” by the CIA of terrorist detainees. It boasts the tension of a thriller despite having the plot no more complex than that of a detective story: Maya, a CIA analyst played skilfully by Jessica Chastain as a sort of Carrie Mathiesen without the crazy, latches on to a new bit of information from one of those detainees and refuses to let it go, even though years of false starts and dead ends, because she believes that what detainees aren’t saying is often as telling as what they are.

Maya’s obsession with this detail, the name of a man whom she believes has substantial direct access to the big foozle himself, leads to some slightly predictable clashes with bosses and colleagues, one played by a surprisingly lifeless Kyle Chandler, but also emphasizes her isolation from nearly everyone she works with except for those who share her particular ardor for this clue. She eventually puts together just enough convincing evidence and just enough of a threat to her boss to put a surveillance team on the finally-located target, which leads to one of the film’s best scenes, where four operatives drive around a hostile city tracking the target’s cell phone to try to identify him in person – something that could be as dull as a butter knife but is filmed and paced to layer tension on top of it.

Bigelow’s other method of infusing tension into a story that, at its core, is a slow chase down a paper trail, is to use reality to punctuate the fits and starts of Maya’s search efforts. The film opens with a black screen and recordings of 911 calls from victims of the September 11th attacks, and the story eventually weaves in the London and Madrid attacks, the Islamabad Marriott bombing, and the suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Such detours provide context for the increased emphasis within the CIA’s unit looking for bin Laden/al-Qaeda on finding targets to kill, as well as creating some of the moral ambiguity that might be upsetting the film’s critics – if al-Qaeda continues to launch attacks, does that justify using unethical or unconscionable means to try to stop them?

The final third of the film, in which two choppers full of Navy SEALs (including Chris “Bert Macklin” Pratt and Joel Edgerton) raid bin Laden’s compound in the middle of the night, should have been more than enough to earn Bigelow a Best Director nod. Filmed with minimal light, often through the perspective of the SEALs’ night-vision goggles, and almost entirely from a ground-level view that further obscures the audience’s vision, it still refuses to take sides – even though the audience knows the target is worthy of this effort to execute him – and makes superb use of silence to put the audience into the house with the SEALs, while playing the actual killing of bin Laden in a deliberate, understated manner that seems so un-Hollywood it’s hard to believe this was an American film.

The claims around Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of CIA-direct torture seem to contradict themselves: The film advocates torture, it fails to condemn torture, and it shows torture as useless. Certainly the last point has value – the critical revelation from a tortured detainee comes not as he’s being waterboarded or stuffed in a box that would cramp a small child’s body, but as he’s being fed a normal Middle Eastern meal while Maya and her “I-vuz-just-following-orders” colleague Dan trick him into thinking he’s already told them key details but has forgotten about it. I see no argument that the film supports the use of torture, since it shows such techniques quite brutally and has examples of information derived from torture as unreliable. Adding condemnation is largely unnecessary; if you can watch the torture scenes without flinching or averting your eyes, you might be a sociopath. Watching a grown man beg for mercy, or the deterioration in his face over multiple scenes, is repulsive enough. Bigelow doesn’t need to turn this into a finger-wagging morality play because the truth itself mocks us for our own indifference.

Boal’s script runs the story like a documentary without interviews, as if we’re watching action in real time, with so much emphasis on the central storyline that we are spared subplots or any real investment in characters beyond Maya. That means that some talented actors appear in very limited roles, such as the CIA station chief, Jessica, played by Jennifer Ehle, looking more like a bewigged Meryl Streep than Elizabeth Bennet; or Edgerton and Pratt, who get a few moments of seriousness and a few of clowning before setting off on the climactic raid. I’m usually a strong advocate of character development in films, especially ones of this length, but there is so much to the underlying story and its unfurling is so masterful that any digressions to give us more on the characters would have like punching pinholes in a garden hose. Perhaps the script’s worst moment comes when Jessica tries to grill Maya over her personal life, including lack of friends (really? not a single one?) or disinterest in office hookups (“I don’t want to be the girl that fucks,” a throwaway phrase ironic given Maya’s later deployment of profanity that marks one of the film’s best lines).

I don’t understand how Bigelow ended up on the outside of the Best Director Oscar nominations, and I’m not enough of an expert on film direction to offer more than an amateur’s “I don’t get it” on the subject. Zero Dark Thirty is superb almost start to finish, definitely the strongest of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, with Chastain a worthy Best Actress nominee, although I’d still lean toward Jennifer Lawrence for her work with a more complex role in Silver Linings Playbook. To the credit of Boal, Bigelow, and Chastain, however, they turned a marvelous trick with her character: They’ve built a strong, smart, desexualized female protagonist who ends up pretty damn sexy just by being awesome.

On the same subject, two books earn a number of mentions in articles about the Zero Dark Thirty non-troversy: Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden and the pseudonymous SEAL team member Mark Owen’s No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. I’ve never read either book.

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→ January 14, 2013
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

I’ve long had an interest, bording on the obsessive, with learning foreign languages, dating back to early childhood. I find the way they work fascinating, since we’re all expressing the same concepts and images and yet do so in sometimes inscrutably different ways. One such way is through idioms, like my favorite Spanish expression, “canta otro gallo,” which is the equivalent of the English expression “that’s another story” but literally translates to “another rooster crows.” It’s far more colorful and brings a concrete image to mind that even made it hard for me as a non-native speaker to remember.

The Spanish language also has a wonderful phrase for what we call old age or might euphemistically refer to as one’s “golden years” – la tercera edad, meaning “the third age,” after childhood and one’s working adult life. The idiom seems better to reflect the expectation today that people in developed countries will outlive their working years by a decade or more, and must, therefore, plan accordingly lest they outlive their money as well. The idea of a third age confers hope and promise on a period that automatically conjures fears of mortality, indigence, ill health, and loneliness. They are years to be lived, actively, not to be dreaded or avoided.

For the seven characters who populate the film and the building The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, this third age begins with subtle hopes for a fresh start in India, away from varying disasters they’ve left behind in England. The retirees find, of course, that the hotel is nowhere near what it promised to be, but once there, ostensibly without funds to return home, most of the guests choose to make what they can of the situation, developing new relationships while adapting to their shared fates.

The setup is brief, as it should be, as the magic only truly begins when the performers are thrown together in non-air-conditioned methods of transportation on the subcontinent. The various characters are retirees who have moved to India to stretch their retirement funds further, or get a hip replacement faster than would be possible in England, or to avoid an ignominious decline into grandma/babysitter territory. Once there, they encounter a comedy of errors in the titular hotel, in which the phones don’t work and most guest rooms have doors. The hotel is run by the perpetually optimistic and fast-talking young Sonny, who is desperate to make his plan to “outsource” old age work both as a vocation (so he can marry his very pretty girlfriend Sonaina) and as a purpose in life, but who has the business acumen of a sea cucumber. (As opposed to anemones, who are surprisingly good at identifying core competencies.) Most of the Indian characters involved here are thinly drawn and exist primarily for the Englishmen and -women to play off, although given who’s playing those roles, I find it hard to argue with this approach.

The movie boasts the greatest cast of any movie released in 2012, with two Oscar winners in Judi Dench and Maggie Smith (twice); a Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee in Tom Wilkinson; another Golden Globe winner in Bill Nighy (who excelled as the editor-in-chief in State of Play); and Penelope Wilton, winner of several major awards for British theatre and now better known here as the do-gooder Isobel Crawley, with all four performers honored as Officers of the British Empire or higher. Unsurprisingly, Smith and Dench steal most of their scenes, with Smith dropping a few Lady Violet looks on the locals and Dench often sounding like the Queen of England (and occasionally like the voice from Spaceship Earth). Celia Imrie is a bit one-note as the cougar of the group, although she gets in her share of one-liners, while Ronald Pickup is the amiable past-prime Casanova who gets the best introduction to the audience and plays it to the hilt. It’s a loaded group, given a witty and clever script, yet there’s an underlying seriousness to the performances (rooted in their characters) that elevates the film to the status of award consideration.

You can’t make a film about seven old people without something going awry, and a few things do, perhaps fewer than expected – but the film is a hopeful comedy at heart, so we can give the writers a bit more leeway. It’s the interactions between the characters that make the film sing, and within those it’s the interactions between the actors themselves – Nighy and Dench, Nighy and Wilton, Dench and Wilkinson, Smith and pretty much anybody – that are so striking. You want to see Justin Verlander face Mike Trout, but you hope it doesn’t end with an intentional walk or a hit batsman; you want to see a ten-pitch at bat where each player is at his best, regardless of the final outcome. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel boasts a dozen or more such at bats and some of them are epic. Dench earned a Golden Globe nomination, with Smith nominated in the same category for her role in Quartet; the film was shut out at the Oscars, but I could have seen a case for either actress or for Nighy, whose role is central to the film and who must play the exasperated husband clutching at a straw of happiness while his raincloud of a shrewish wife stews in the next room. He and Dench share two of the film’s most memorable scenes, and while their relationship on-screen grows almost glacially (he is, after all, a married man), there’s a remarkable chemistry between them that derives almost entirely from outside of the film – that these are two performers so effortlessly comfortable in their roles and with each other that they can convey the interest in each other on screen with barely any words or action to depict it.

The film doesn’t pander to the viewers with a giant, rousing finish, rewarding us and some of its characters with small victories rather than large ones, all under the general theme that the third age is one to be enjoyed and appreciated. The one character most determined to throw these years away will undoubtedly succeed in doing so, while those who choose to maximize their experiences – even just exploring their new hometown of Jaipur and seeing its tourist attractions or shopping in its central market – will be all the happier for doing so. You could really extend the same lesson to the first and second ages as well.

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→ January 11, 2013
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Django Unchained.

I was busy yesterday, with a Klawchat and the Baseball Today podcast, the latter featuring my interview with Nate Silver, who denies being a witch. Those followed my ranking of the top 25 players under 25, which went up yesterday morning and requires an Insider membership.

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I went into Django Unchained with somewhat limited expectations: I’m not a Tarantino fanboy by any stretch, and the two most frequent comments I’d heard about this film were that it was too long and too violent. It is violent, although nearly all of it is of the cartoonish variety, with just one scene that I would have cropped or eliminated. It’s long at 165 minutes, but aside from that one scene there’s virtually no fat to trim. It’s also clever, funny, sentimental almost to sappiness, righteously angry, and borderline absurd – a glorious alternate-history revenge fantasy that lacks the broad scope of Inglorious Basterds‘ vengeance but gives us the titular character as a stronger protagonist to exact retribtution on behalf of his race.

Django (a perpetually seething Jamie Foxx) begins the movie in chains, one of a group of recently-purchased slaves who are being led through a dark, dare-I-say mysterious forest by two white brothers, when they are miraculously intercepted by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, who scored a Best Supporting Actor nod for the role), a dentist-turned-bounty-hunter who, as it happens, is looking specifically for Django. His incredible fortune in finding this caravan without a GPS is never quite explained, nor is the fact that Django, who ends up joining Schultz in the bounty-hunting business, is a preternaturally accurate shot with virtually any sort of firearm.

The two hunt down a few targets before turning to the task of rescuing Django’s wife Brunhilda (Kerry Washington, who has two jobs, to look pretty and act scared, and does fairly well at both) from the unctuous plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, chewing scenery like it’s a cud). Candie likes to buy and train slaves for “Mandingo fighting,” a human equivalent to cockfighting with no historical basis in fact but which is named as an allusion to the 1975 blaxploitation film Mandingo, which Tarantino has cited as a favorite of his. (He also honors another blaxploitation film with Brunhilda’s white surname, Von Schaft.) Django and Schultz claim to be slavers interested in buying a slave for use in Mandingo fighting, all as a pretense for seeing and buying Brunhilda on the cheap. Only the head house-slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, playing this traitor to his race to the hilt), has any inkling that something is amiss.

Tarantino has figured out the way to tell a good slavery joke: Make the white people involved the joke’s targets. The various slaveowners and white lackeys are all odious in various ways, but Tarantino infuses them with comic weaknesses that he proceeds to exploit, most successfully in the absurd scene where a Klan raid breaks down because the white bags they are using as masks have eyeholes that don’t allow the riders to see properly. Quick yet florid dialogue that is obviously absurd yet can sound real enough to work for the audience is a difficult trick to pull off, yet Django‘s dialogue never broke that suspension of disbelief for me, and Tarantino’s script concludes with a flurry of self-referential lines that build on the humor of the first times the lines were delivered.

That same suspension of disbelief didn’t quite hold as well for the violence, largely because Tarantino appears to believe that human bodies are 98% blood, with perhaps some sort of light exoskeleton that keeps us from turning into landlocked jellyfish. Aside from one murder near the film’s end that evoked raucous laughter in the theater – I’m including myself in that – the extent of the splattering was a distraction, and appeared to be Tarantino just exuding in the fact that, yeah, he can take a tense shootout and make it so gross that it breaks the tension because the splashes are louder than the gunshots. The non-gun violence in the film was more disturbing and generally more effective at ratcheting up our hatred for the white folk Django will eventually target, because of the degree to which this violence, from torture to murder, shows the extent to which these whites view blacks as something less than human.

Tarantino’s last film made Nazis its targets, because, of course, who doesn’t love watching a Nazi get what’s coming to him? With slavery and racism at the heart of Django, however, Tarantino wanders into more dangerous emotional territory with the film’s heavy use of the n-word and with the depiction of some blacks as complicit in their own subjugation. The use of what is today a nasty racial epithet but was, in 1858-59, a common term for African-Americans, didn’t bother me because it is grounded in historical accuracy; I don’t want to see the term removed from Huckleberry Finn or the wandering Jew scrubbed from The Scarlet Pimpernel either, because they are monuments to the racial or ethnic attitudes of their times. But I imagine the role of Stephen as a black slave who, in return for privileges he’s been granted by a serious of owners, takes on the role of overseer of the house slaves, betraying his race and contributing to institutionalized racism, will make many viewers uncomfortable, even as it becomes clear that Stephen is doing so not from ignorance but from a clear strategy of self-preservation. Candie even delivers a speech in the film that argues that blacks didn’t fight back because of neurological inferiority, but we can dismiss that as the outdated racialist thinking of one of the film’s most hateful characters. Stephen is much harder to hand-wave away.

Waltz’ performance as Dr. Schultz could very easily win him his second Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, and his character has the most difficult development in the film, with subtle changes in his attitudes toward slavery from academic detachment to emotional involvement that lead to the film’s slam-bang finish. Foxx’s barely-contained rage gains articulacy through the film, but as strong as his performance was, it had a hint of one-note to it that might explain why he was overlooked in the Best Actor category. DiCaprio, normally such a strong actor in any sort of role, brings a bizarre flamboyancy to the role, starting with the overplayed deep-south accent and continuing with the vaguely incestuous flirting with his widowed sister, herself a cipher of a character despite a fair amount of screen time. Jackson worked with the most difficult material as Stephen, the Uncle Tom of the Candie estate (unironically referred to as “Candieland”), and he dominates most of his scenes between his stentorian delivery, impossible to hide even behind his character’s duplicitous yes-massah stammerings, and a glare so searing that it at one point reduces Brunhilda to tears. His appearance in the film’s second half transforms the movie from straight revenge fantasy to a somewhat more complex study of slavery through a conflict between African-American characters, one that doesn’t delivery any answers but provides a thought-provoking component to the film that would have been absent had we just been following Django around on a justified killing spree.

Revenge fantasies themselves, given the proper targets, can be superficially satisfying but will lack any kind of staying power beyond the closing credits and can leave the viewer feeling slightly empty the way he might after, say, wiping out a package of Oreos. I have little interest in a straight exploitation film, which I feared Django might be based on some early word-of-mouth, especially regarding the copious quantities of blood involved, but the film was both far funnier and more incisive than I anticipated. Tarantino could have stuck with cartoon violence and avoided any hints at the barbarism of slavery, but he took the hard way, with various scenes of brutal treatment, all presented without the sensationalism of the shootouts and made more effective through that contrast. The camera lingers on bodies spurting a quart of blood for every bullet, but when a slave is branded, the scene is truncated, and when a slave is torn apart by dogs, it’s shown so obliquely that the violence is largely implied – and those latter scenes are the ones that matter. Only the fight scene between the two “Mandingos” broke this rule, and deserved a major edit, but otherwise Django makes excellent use of its running length to entertain its audience in a thoughtful way.

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→ December 26, 2012
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The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat and Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

I have a piece up today for Insiders on the Joel Hanrahan trade. There is no Klawchat this week due to the holidays.

If I asked you who invented penicillin, you’d probably give the standard answer of Alexander Fleming, and maybe recall a story of him accidentally getting some bread mold in a Petri dish and noticing its antibacterial qualities. Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, ended up sharing a Nobel Prize for this discovery and received accolades for decades beyond his death, even though, as Eric Lax details in the surprisingly gripping The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle, Fleming wasn’t actually the first to identify that the Penicillium notatum mold could kill several dangerous species of bacteria, nor was he at all involved in the massive effort to translate this laboratory accident into a usable weapon for human medicine.

Lax’s work is brief (263 pages) and very easy to read, but his research into the subject of the discovery and development of the now-ubiquitous drug is thorough and relied heavily on first-person accounts from the era, including journal notes, correspondence, and interviews with surviving members of the team at Oxford that undertook years of experiments to figure out how to scale mold production and also understand its functioning. Fleming did share the Nobel with the Australian Howard Florey and the German-born Ernst Chain, but the latter two, working at the Dunn School of Pathology under the privations of wartime England, managed to demonstrate that P. notatum was safe to use in humans and effective against bacteria, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus, that at that time had no known chemotherapeutic antagonists. (That is, if you got a staph infection from a scratch from a rose thorn, there wasn’t much hope for your recovery.) Fleming wasn’t even the first to notice that P. notatum had antibacterial properties – the Belgian bacteriologist Andre Gratia apparently observed it three years earlier, but, like Fleming, didn’t follow through.

Lax attempts to shine light on those who deserve it, not just Florey and Chain but others, including Norman Heatley, without whose knowhow the drug might never have been produced in quantity. Lax goes back to the myth of Fleming’s discovery of the mold’s effects – Fleming did indeed discover it, but the legend of how he did so, which he himself propagated once Florey’s team made the drug viable, is likely false, according to Lax’s research. The focus then shifts to the Dunn School and the difficulties Florey had in assembling a team, finding funding for their work, and in producing enough of the stuff to keep the testing going – even salvaging penicillin from the urine of patients fortunate enough to receive it, as more than half of what a patient was given was eventually excreted via the kidneys. Lax’s access to contemporary documents and later in-person accounts allows him to flesh out the personalities of these central actors, as well as providing details on some of the early successes and failures of the drug as the scientists figured out how best to use it, including the now-common practice of administering an antibiotic for a week or more past the disappearance of symptoms. I’ll also leave the very amusing detail of how pencillin extraction moved from P. notatum to the more potent P. chrysogenum to those of you who choose to read the book.

Where Lax could have gone further was in explaining the science behind penicillin’s action, which he mentions just briefly near the end of the book. Penicillin is a beta-lactam antibiotic that inhibits cell wall development in bacteria, especially Gram-positive ones – meaning that when one cell tries to divide, its cell wall will rupture rather than expanding and closing around each resulting cell, so no new cell is formed and the original cell becomes a wall-less and very fragile spheroplast. Resistance to penicillin also only earns scant mention, again at the very end of the book, with some polite hand-waving about the subject and positive words about penicillin’s continued effectiveness against Streptococcus, but no mention of the rise of Staphylococcus bacteria that have evolved resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics in general. This is a history of science book that leans more toward history yet is a little light on the science for my tastes, but that may increase its accessibility to less science-inclined readers and absolutely made it an easier book to tackle.

If you like your popular science books a little heavier on the science, I also just read Jonah Lehrer’s first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist ($5.98 through that link), which draws parallels between various famous practicioners of the fine arts (and one very famous chef) and later discoveries, mostly by neurologists, that showed that the artists’ insights into human psychology and behavior were biologically justified. Lehrer’s star was nearly extinguished when the first chapter of his 2012 book Imagine – a book I enjoyed tremendously – was found to contain fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, after which the publisher pulled the book from publication entirely rather than edit and re-release it. (It’s still a great book if you want to learn more about how to be more creative, especially in the workplace.) Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more like a collection of nonfiction stories that share a basic narrative structure: Lehrer introduces a famous writer, musician, or artist, describes his/her oeuvre and a particular advance or insight for which s/he is known, then explains the science behind that insight, discovered decades after the artist’s work.

My favorite chapter was, of course, the one on chef and culinary writer Auguste Escoffier, one of the fathers of modern French cuisine and the man who first wrote down a specific method – not just a recipe, but a concept – for making brown veal stock, now the foundation for an entire family of sauces without which French cuisine as we know it would not exist. Escoffier’s great contribution, according to Lehrer, was his understanding of what we now know as umami, the so-called “fifth taste” – the intensity of flavor produced by glutamate, which is recognized by the tongue and is found in rich foods from Parmiggiano-Reggiano to anchovies to soy sauce to cured meats to mushrooms. (It’s also found in powdered form as monosodium glutamate.) The chemical basis behind Escoffier’s insight was first discovered after he had already risen to prominence in European food circles and wasn’t fully demonstrated until long after his death. Lehrer uses these eight examples to plead for greater interaction between the science and art worlds, arguing that each can learn from the other if they speak a common, “third” language. That message is largely lost on me as someone who works in neither sphere, but some of the anecdotes, including the ones on Paul Cézanne and Igor Stravinsky, were fascinating reads because they involved areas of the fine arts in which I have little to no background, even as a casual fan. I don’t take a jaundiced view of Lehrer’s earlier work just because of the debacle around Imagine, so just as I still recommend that book with the caveats around its veracity, I recommend Proust Was a Neuroscientist as well even if its underlying message isn’t as powerful.

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→ December 19, 2012
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Silver Linings Playbook.

David O. Russell’s Oscar-nominated 2010 film The Fighter underwhelmed me relative to its critical acclaim because the story felt so generic, salvaged by great performances in the lead and supporting roles. With his follow-up, Silver Linings Playbook, based on a 2008 novel by Matthew Quick, Russell is mining more serious territory – most of the central characters are grappling with various forms of mentall illness – but with the general tone of an indie comedy, resulting in a film that takes its serious issues seriously, but not so seriously that the movie drags or becomes something less than enjoyable.

Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper, showing unexpected range) is just getting out of an eight-month stint in a mental institution where he’s been receiving treatment for bipolar disorder after “the explosion,” an incident (later hashed out in full) that resulted in a plea agreement that kept him out of jail but left him with a restraining order against him and some fear and prejudice among neighbors and former co-workers. His parents, played by Oscar winner Robert Deniro and Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver (for 2010’s Animal Kingdom), form an unstable support system for Pat, unable to fully understand his disorder or, in the case of Pat’s father, to separate his own needs from those of his son.

Pat’s one constant friend, Ronnie, himself dealing with a pretty serious anxiety problem but receiving no help for it, ends up introducing Pat to his sister-in-law Tiffani (Jennifer Lawrence), a recently widowed young woman with serious issues of her own beyond her grieving, and the two form an immediate connection over dinner when discussing the side effects of their various medications. (I particularly laughed at the discussion of Klonopin, an anti-depressant I was once prescribed as a sleep aid but never took because I was concerned about … well, exactly what Pat and Tiffani described.) Their partnership in healing is uneasy between Pat’s lack of any filter between his brain and his mouth and Tiffani’s wildly varying emotional states, but it’s also evident from the start that the two will end up together – and, to the credit of Cooper and the always-impressive Lawrence, it feels surprisingly natural. Tiffani extorts Pat into being her partner in a couples dance competition, which feels a little implausible, and that ends up a family-wide event due to a rather improbable two-event parlay that was the movie’s one real false note for me. The Pat-Tiffani storyline works independently of the bet, which is played for laughs rather than plot and only provides a reason for Pat’s father to be there at the end to give his son some advice that Pat didn’t actually need after all.

The film is absolutely carried by the performances of its four principals, led by Lawrence, who I argued was worthy of the 2010 Best Actress Oscar over the landslide favorite, Natalie Portman, for Lawrence’s performance in Winter’s Bone. Lawrence has a stronger groundswell of support now, as one of Hollywood’s It Girls, thanks in part to her lead role in The Hunger Games, but she does the most in this film with the hardest role because her character lacks emotional boundaries – she varies from desperate to angry to crushed to sultry from sentence to sentence, and conveys her grief over her husband’s death and her own previous emotional problems as much through body language and tone as through her dialogue. (She’s also stunning as a brunette.) Deniro turns in what is probably his best work in a decade, playing Pat’s highly superstitious father, himself likely dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness, loving his son and yet obviously fearing him at the same time because he can’t understand why his son acts and speaks the way he does. Weaver, an Australian actress who dominated Animal Kingdom as the amoral head of a ruthless crime family, nails the Philadelphia accent and the role of the subservient wife to a husband who’s probably been something between difficult and impossible for their entire marriage. I could see all three earning Oscar nods, while Brad Cooper, who lacks the others’ history of work in serious roles and would be up in the most competitive category, gets Jim Carrey’d and ends up on the outside looking in. We even get a few great scenes from Chris Tucker, talking faster than ever, and Julia Stiles, somewhat surprising as a domineering wife to Pat’s friend Ronnie.

I was also very happy with how the film dealt with mental illness, taking it seriously but infusing what could have been a very depressing subject with humor, both dark and silly. (Anupam Kher has a couple of scene-stealing lines as Pat’s therapist.) Pat has several episodes of manic or depressive behavior, as well as the “explosion” shown in flashbacks, and some of them are, appropriate, quite painful to watch. I’ve seen several reviews, including the A/V Club’s top 20 films of 2012, that denigrated the film as a “rom-com” that implies that the cure for bipolarity is finding the right, quirky girl. I think those critics miss the point entirely: Pat gets better over the course of the film once he starts taking his medication, investing himself in therapy, and following his therapist’s advice to develop coping strategies and expose himself to potential triggers. That’s how treatment works for any mental illness, including the anxiety disorder for which I’ve belatedly getting treatment this year. Silver Linings absolutely makes it clear that the medication and treatment are working because Pat’s character doesn’t evolve until he gets serious about them. His moods change, his filter reappears, and his word choices start to reflect things he’d likely be hearing or discussing in therapy. Russell doesn’t shove this down our throats, elevating the romantic element (even though Pat and Tiffani don’t actually kiss until the penultimate scene) over the mental-illness storyline, but he lays it all out for anyone who’s paying attention, and respects the subject even while often deriving humor from it. I don’t see how anyone could walk away from this film getting any other message about mental illness beyond “get professional help.”

Silver Linings Playbook is a comedy, and there is a romance, but calling it a rom-com doesn’t do it justice because it omits what sets this film apart from even indie romantic comedies. It tackles a serious subject with intelligence and wit while enveloping the viewer in a compelling romance that builds organically through mostly natural plot elements. The character development is far stronger than in even a good “rom-com,” and the performances are all Oscar-worthy, especially in what seems to be a weak year for serious films. And it’s pretty damn funny too. All rom-coms should be so good.

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