‘Silver’ star captures bipolar role’s complexity
Outside the windows of Waterbar on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, the city is putting on a show. The Blue Angels are practicing, buzzing the Bay Bridge; America’s Cup catamarans are skating over the bay; and seagulls are wheeling through the air. Director David O. Russell and actor Bradley Cooper, who have come to the Bay Area to open the Mill Valley Film Festival with their drama “Silver Linings Playbook,” are appreciative of the view, but their hearts and minds are clearly still back in Philadelphia, the setting of their film and Cooper’s hometown.
“This movie is sort of a dream for Philadelphians,” the 37-yearold actor says. “The localness of it is insane. It was wonderful, because my mom was there, my friends were there and my cousins were there.”
“Bradley’s from the neighborhood right near where we shot,” Russell adds. “It’s so specific to Philadelphia. That’s one of the things I loved after ‘The Fighter.’ I wrote this before ‘The Fighter’ and discovered that I really, really like specific neighborhoods of people and families.”
Adapted from Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel, “Silver Linings Playbook” stars Cooper as Pat Solitano, a former teacher learning how to live among people again after being institutionalized with bipolar disorder. Cooper’s childhood acting idol and “Limitless” co-star Robert De Niro and “Animal Kingdom’s” Jacki Weaver play Pat’s parents, guardians now to their grown son. Jennifer Lawrence co-stars as a widowed neighbor who takes a shine to Pat.
Russell is familiar with bipolar disorder, having witnessed its effects in a family member, and directs Cooper to a complex, ultimately transcendent performance as a man who sometimes seems as if he might have been released from the hospital too soon. Speaking volumes for its appeal is the fact that “Silver Linings Playbook” won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film made its world premiere, and has picked up audience awards at other festivals, including Mill Valley, where it won the Audience Favorite U.S. Cinema award.
Originally, Russell thought he would cast as Pat his longtime collaborator Mark Wahlberg — who starred for the director in “Three Kings” (1999), “I Heart Huckabees” (2004) and most recently “The Fighter” (2010) — but when insurmountable scheduling conflicts became apparent, Russell was on the hunt for a new leading man. Years before, he had been impressed with Cooper’s performance as Rachel McAdams’ alphamale fiance in “Wedding Crashers,” and the two men had since become friendly.
“When I watched him in ‘Wedding Crashers,’ I thought there was anger in him. That character was convincingly angry to me in an intimidating way,” Russell remembers. “When ‘The Hangover’ happened, we sat down to take a meeting about other pictures and things. I said, ‘I gotta tell you, I don’t know. You seem like you’re angry.’ One of the reasons I thought he might be able to do a role like this is you have to be able to be incredibly angry, to have incredible, strong emotions that seem real. I said, ‘You seem very angry to me,’ and he revealed all these beautiful layers to me and personal openness to me, but he said, ‘Yes, at that time, I used anger, because I was not happy in
these roles.’ All of sudden, it hit me, “Whoa, who is that open and personal in our business?’ It was all real.
“I love the chance we were all taking together,” he adds. “I knew it was a chance. Everybody was like, ‘Do you think he can do it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, he can do it. I think it’s going to be exciting.’ I knew his vulnerability and I knew his intensity and I knew his hunger. There is nothing better that a director can have than someone who is sincere and hungry. You can’t ask anything more.”
Like Pat, Cooper is a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Over lunch, he talks about the team’s win over the New York Giants the previous Sunday and wide receiver DeSean Jackson’s touchdown, his first of the season. The sports talk points to a happy byproduct in casting Cooper: The actor knows and loves the city so well that Russell was, in a way, getting an unofficial technical adviser.
“My mother grew up in that house pretty much that Pat Solitano grows up in. It was really reminiscent of my childhood in a huge way,” Cooper says. “So whatever fears I had about playing this character and how it was a different experience doing a David O. Russell movie, certainly in my favor was the fact that there were so many tangible memories and familiar visuals throughout the whole filmmaking process.
“You believe that they live in that house and they walk those streets. They don’t drive cars. What movies have you seen where people walk to each other’s houses? That is what life is like. That’s what my life was like growing up.”
Making it that much more real for Cooper was acting opposite De Niro. The two men became friends when they made “Limitless” together, and that real-life relationship gave Cooper a leg up in the scenes between Pat and his father.
“Bob was a real anchor,” he says. “I knew as long as Bob’s there, I’ll be OK, because I love him. Calling him ‘Dad,’ I knew I would be able to say it and believe it coming out of my mouth. And I think I say it a lot in the movie, I say ‘Dad’ a lot. I always felt that connection to him.”
“Silver Linings Playbook” is not a one-shot deal for director and actor. Russell and Cooper are already in preproduction on their next project together, a yet-to-be-titled drama co-starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner set during the 1970s Abscam scandal. In the meantime, the “Silver Linings” cast has been nominated for a Gotham Award for best ensemble cast, and there is talk that Cooper might score an Oscar nomination for his performance.
“Pat is being reintroduced into his community, and he says, ‘You don’t really know me,’ ” Russell says. “I feel that’s what we’re doing with Bradley in the movie. I feel like audiences are remeeting him, anyone who thinks they know him from ‘The Hangover.’ That’s exciting to me when you can do that with an actor.”