Genre in Bad Faith
by Brian Crane
So I wasn't going to watch Silver
Linings Playbook. I'd seen the trailer and was pretty sure that it would be
terrible. Then one day, I found myself heading to a theatre to watch this thing
with Caitlin as part of our Best Picture screening list. Sitting down, I was
genuinely confused: how could a trailer be so misleading? I quickly learned, it
wasn't.
This movie is clearly a romantic
comedy. But in what I take to be a bid for contemporaneity or seriousness, it
makes a big deal about cutting through the bull, getting real, and addressing
the problems of relationships today. The hard truth this film proposes is that a
lot of us are sick, diagnosable, requiring accommodation. To know each other,
the characters don't need to communicate. They just need to be brought up to
speed on their case histories. And so, in scene after bathetic scene, we listen
to unpleasant characters announce their diagnoses to each other as if these
constituted personalities. "I AM" he says. "I AM" she says. "I AM" he says. And
so on and so on. And who cares?
For all it's self-importance, this
approach to character is much more simplistic than the approach native to
romantic comedies of the classic 1930s sort. Watch Bringing Up Baby or
The Philadelphia Story or It Happened One Night and you'll see
movies about adults made for adults. They have happy endings, yes. But these
movies earn those endings in complicated and emotionally complex stories that
transform their characters and launch them forward into life. Nothing in
romantic comedy--the cinematic genre most closely related to the theatre of
Shakespeare--is simple or easy. It only seems that way because we want so badly
for its faith in us to be true.
Silver Linings Playbook may
believe its view of humanity is smarter and truer than romantic comedy's, but in
the end, it can't pull off the picture it wants to paint. "I AM" plus "I AM"
doesn't equal "we." And so in it's final moments, the movie generates the
romantic closure it seeks by embracing (without avowing) the romantic genre it
has worked so hard to repudiate. Out of the blue, this movie about him saying "I
AM sick, that's just me," and her saying "I AM (not) a slut, deal with it,"
becomes a movie about a dance competition, one part Strictly Ballroom,
one part Little Miss Sunshine. Untrained, outclassed and with all of the
family's fortunes on the line (don't ask), the characters decide to try their
best, dance their hardest, and in the end, against all odds, discover they can
do it if they just let go and have fun. The family fortune is saved, and the
two, now lovers, find each other and kiss in the empty nighttime streets, happy
finally together.
I think this movie wants to update a
genre. It wants to make those silly, old-fashioned movies take account of what
we "know" today about human experience. How after all, if so much of what we
feel and experience is actually symptomatic of illness, can you find love? It is
telling (and reassuring) that the movie can't offer an answer any different than
the established generic answer. That four-hundred year old tale of marriage
delayed but achieved through work and conversation still rings true to our
experience and aspirations. The tangle of diagnosis this film takes as our lot
does not.
…and yet, all those awards and
nominations…
Something in us wants to believe in
the new story of sick people this movie can't figure out how to tell. And that's
terrifying.
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