So....this movie is about a man and his dad, both bipolar, who are loving, loud, funny, smart, quick tempered, highly emotional, loyal and risk taking. They're played by Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro. Bradley Cooper's love interest is played Jennifer Lawrence. She became an overnight star in The Hunger Games. She is terrific in this movie. Her character, Tiffany, is crazy smart and crazy. Period. Along with all the other bipolar attributes listed above.
To me, the movie is very funny, very sad and very real. And, because it's real, very scary.
However, I would have changed the ending a bit. They take a crazy (bipolar type) risk and it turns out well. Unfortunately, that's not reality. For every super successful bipolar person (like Ted Turner) there are hundreds of folks who've lost everything due to their risk taking behaviors.
There is one thing that Cooper's character did that I thought made sense. The day he arrived home from the hospital he read Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." After reading the ending he went berserk.
I remember. forty years ago, reading the book and feeling the same way. I wanted to go berserk with that book's ending. But I'm not bipolar so I just stuffed my feelings like us "normal" folks do.
Many of the people in this world who bring us color and light, beauty and art and out of the box thinking - are "different."
Many of them are loving, loud, funny, smart, quick tempered, highly emotional, loyal and risk taking. This keeps the people around them exhausted and longing for peace and quiet.
So we have to work at ways to find the "Silver Linings" in these relationships. That's what the folks in this movie are trying to do.
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