Broken City, Silver Linings Playbook

Reel Advice: Silver city

If you never imagined you'd see the day that Mark Wahlberg would be the best actor in a movie co-starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Russell Crowe, that day has come. In Broken City (20th Century Fox), Billy Taggart (Wahlberg, who improves with each movie), a hothead, recovering alcoholic New York cop is found not guilty of killing a rapist/murderer who died under suspicious circumstances. Taggart loses his job anyway because of new evidence discovered, and kept hidden, as his trial neared its conclusion.

Seven years later, Taggart works as a private investigator. He is looked after by strong women who have his best interests in mind. His feisty office manager Katy (Alona Tal) goes after their deadbeat clients with a vengeance. His girlfriend Natalie (Natalie Martinez), a budding indie film actress, tries her best to put him at ease around her artsy colleagues.

Hostetler (Crowe, mildly less offensive than he was in Les Miserables), the mayor who was in office at the time of Taggart's trial and still rules the boroughs, is running for reelection in a close race. He hires Taggart to investigate his wife Cathleen (Jones, whose performance gets better as the movie goes on), whom he suspects of cheating on him. But it's all a ruse. It turns out Cathleen, who is such a good friend to the gays that she is a featured speaker at an HRC event, is in cahoots with closeted councilman Valliant (Barry Pepper) and his campaign manager/paramour Paul (Kyle Chandler) to bring the mayor down due to his ties to a very profitable, but shady real estate deal.

Broken City is the kind of crime and corruption thriller where the plot twists and turns are relatively easy to solve. It's to the credit of director Allen Hughes (one half of the Hughes brothers stepping out on his own) that he keeps things interesting and watching the characters go through their own process of discovery is fairly entertaining.

Have you ever heard the (variation on) the saying, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And neither does the nut?" That certainly applies to the broken father/son duo in David O. Russell's Oscar-nominated/Golden Globe Award-winning Silver Linings Playbook (The Weinstein Company). The "silver linings" of the title refer to Pat's (Bradley Cooper), son of Patrizio (Robert DeNiro), quest for excelsior, for a silver lining in his most hopeless of situations. A manic, uncooperative, pill-spitting patient in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital, Pat is serving a sentence for almost killing the man with whom his estranged wife Nikki (Brea Bree ) was sleeping.

The title's "playbook" belongs to Patrizio. The combination of his own psychotic behaviors, which include being obsessive/compulsive, living his live according to unrealistic superstitions and his serious gambling addiction, didn't make him the best father to Pat. When Pat's well-intentioned mother Dolores (Jacki Weaver) brings Pat home to live with her and his father, it's obvious that none of them is prepared what lies ahead.

Enter young widow Tiffany (Golden Globe Award-winner and Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence). The sister of an old friend of Pat's, Tiffany brings her share of drama to the table, including recent unemployment due to sexual promiscuity in the workplace. Pat and Tiffany are brought together with the intention that perhaps they would in some way be able to heal other. Instead, they spend most of their time together picking at each other's scabs and inflicting new pain.

If this sounds like it's all too much to bear, it almost is. But writer/director David O. Russell, famous for quirky albeit brilliant films such as The Fighter and Flirting With Disaster, keeps you in your seat until the very end, even as each new emotional train wreck arrives at the crossing. Oscar nominee Cooper gives the performance of his career, holding his own alongside fellow nominees Weaver and DeNiro. Lawrence, who already been honored (and probably will be again) is the best actress of her generation. Not an easy film to watch on more than one occasion, Silver Linings Playbook is, nevertheless, one of the best films of 2012.