Dismissing Bradley Cooper

It's been a couple years since I've seen Bradley Cooper in anything. In fact, if I had thought of him at all in the past few years, which I haven't, I might have said "Hey, what happened to that guy?" His last movie prior to the last few weeks was in 2019, but he wasn't on screen, as that was just voice work in Avengers: Endgame. Before that it was A Star is Born in 2018, which feels like ages ago. 

It turns out it was just one of those weird issues of COVID timing, as it's now been a Bradley Cooper December. He's in both Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley, neither of which I've seen yet. 

So why am I writing about Bradley Cooper today, you ask?

While scrolling through Facebook on my phone the other day, I came across an article that asked if it was finally time for an "overdue Oscar" for Cooper. 

Overdue? What are they talking about? This is a guy I only first became aware of 16 years ago in Wedding Crashers, and he's only 46. He might score an Oscar nomination every now and again, but that's usually because of the strength of the films he's been in, nothing front runner-y about the performances he's given.

Well, I got some clarification on that "every now and again" frequency of Cooper's Oscar nominations: He's been nominated EIGHT times.

What the hell?

I thought it was a misprint. But I have gone back and confirmed. And surely, any person who has been nominated eight times for his industry's most prestigious award could reasonably be described as overdue to receive it.

He doesn't feel overdue, though, and when going back and considering the roles that have earned these nominations, I think you'll agree with my assessment.

The first thing I discovered, though, was that they were not all roles. Three of the nominations were not acting nominations. That's cheating a bit, don't you think? Cooper was a producer on American Sniper, A Star is Born and Joker -- the latter of which being the only one that was not accompanied by a best actor nomination for the actor, who does not appear in it. As all three of these movies felt like underdogs to get a best picture nod, they were easy for me to forget -- had I even been considering producer credits when my eyes first jumped out of my head at the eight nominations.

Five acting nominations is still pretty impressive, so I had to dig further into that.

His first acting nomination came in 2012 for Silver Linings Playbook, a film I had as my #3 of the year, but which I have not since rewatched. A friend had it has his #1 of the year. But he didn't include it in his best of the decade and I've never felt inclined to go back to it, so I suspect this one has not aged well. Cooper does give a pretty nuanced performance if I remember correctly, with a good mixture of comedy and the anger that highlights the character's mental health issues.

Next up was American Hustle the following year, where Cooper received his first and so-far only supporting actor nomination. It was a second straight nomination in a film directed by David O. Russell. This one didn't work for me nearly as much as Playbook, as I gave it only a marginal thumbs up. I don't remember Cooper either hurting or helping this film. All four of the leads got nominations so he may have just been swept up in the general furor of interest in the film (which, deservedly, did not win any of its ten nominations). 

It was three years in a row for Cooper with American Sniper in 2014. I didn't see the film at the time, but I always remembered that one of the hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest went nuts for it, so I knew I should get to it at some point, and finally did in 2019. Clint Eastwood has made some good films in his dotage, but this is not one of them. I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Ha, I needed to read Wikipedia more closely before starting this. There were actually three separate nominations for Cooper in A Star is Born, one of which was an adapted screenplay nomination. So he actually only has four acting nominations, which is finally starting to sound more correct. This might be his most deserved acting nomination, though I find this film falls apart pretty significantly down the stretch after a powerhouse first hour, of which Cooper is a crucial part. Actually he's a crucial part in both the movie's initial ascent and eventual downfall.

Whether Cooper has eight nominations, or only half that number in terms of the nominations that really "count" (I've always found producer nominations a little suss, even though films obviously need a producer), is besides the point. The article was clearly misleading when it mentioned Cooper's eight nominations very prominently in the text. (And if I needed to read Wikipedia more closely, I probably needed to read the original article more closely as it likely would have saved me some trouble writing this whole post.) I think you can be "overdue" to win an acting award, but you can't be "overdue" as a producer, as your role there is less quantifiable and it's hard to know to what extent your fingerprints are on the final film. For example, do we consider Brad Pitt an essential voice on 12 Years a Slave? I don't think we do.

The point is that I have always dismissed Bradley Cooper a bit, and may continue to do so until he gives me a real reason not to.

I don't have anything against the man. I like him as a screen presence. 

But I think the smarmy asshole we first met in Wedding Crashers has never really gone away in my mind. There's always going to be a bit of the aggro, entitled frat boy in him. There's malice in that smile. There's a part of me that always wants to smack that malicious smile off his face.

Maybe that's key to his work though. Maybe it gives him something either to dive into more deeply, or to play off of. 

Well, I'll have the opportunity to reconsider Cooper as I see Licorice Pizza (probably within the next week or so) and Nightmare Alley (maybe not until later, as it doesn't open here until later in January). Given the different setting of the two films, which seem to ask very different things of him, maybe I'll finally appreciate the range that has gotten Cooper a still impressive four acting nominations.

He won't really seem "overdue," though, until those acting nominations reach eight. 

A silver lining

The surest way to jinx your plans? Give voice to them.

In Wednesday's post, I announced my likelihood of being able to attend a 1:50 3D showing of Life of Pi. Then I didn't make it in time.

But really, is it a jinx if something was simply never realistic in the first place? First off, I was getting off work at 1:30, and you never leave at the exact minute you're supposed to clock out. Secondly, the drive to the theater would have taken the better part of 15 minutes even in normal traffic. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is most decidedly not normal traffic, and you should probably at least double your expected travel times. But even if it had taken only slightly longer than normal to drive there, there's still a parking garage you have to navigate, and a walk of three minutes or so to the theater, even if you are moving quickly. Never mind the fact that a large popcorn was going to be my lunch, and there's always at least one person ahead of you in the snack bar line.

Fortunately, it wasn't one of those situations where I was close enough to even chance it, making me commit a lot of time and energy to a fool's errand. At 1:48, when I was still more than a mile from the theater, I pulled over and jumped on my phone's web browser to figure out other options. I knew there were no more Pi showings that were at a convenient time, so now I was looking for something else.

And so, the silver lining to missing Life of Pi? Silver Linings Playbook.

Which was playing at 2:35 in downtown Culver City, about three miles from the theater where I meant to see Pi. 

I love the work of director David O. Russell, but until now, that had been based primarily on the strength of three movies that were all released in the 1990s: Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings. I hated I Heart Huckabees and ended up thinking The Fighter was good but not great.

Suffice it to say that Silver Linings Playbook had me wondering if it might rank up there with his two masterpieces, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings.

The interesting thing about Russell as a filmmaker isn't that he consistently breaks new ground or blows your mind with some kind of unique technique. After his debut, which you could say was pretty unusual as it dealt with mother-son incest and featured a euphemism for masturbation as its title, I'd argue that Russell has mostly just been giving us really fresh takes on genres we're familiar with. Flirting with Disaster was a fresh take on a screwball comedy, while Three Kings was a fresh take on the war movie (albeit with some genuinely innovative camera and narrative techniques). Has there been a genre that's been more worked over throughout the history of cinema than the boxing movie? Yet most people felt that The Fighter was a really fresh take on that genre.

You could say that the only time Russell really gets himself into trouble is when he tries to indulge his more off-the-wall impulses. Enter I Heart Huckabees, a disaster that was much more than flirted with. A satire about commercialism featuring a pair of existential detectives, Huckabees was a misstep from minute one. It may be no coincidence that this shoot featured the short-fused director's most famous blow-up, a verbal scrum with Lily Tomlin that developed a life of its own on the internet. (He also reportedly nearly or actually came to blows with George Clooney on Three Kings, though that didn't hamper the brilliance of that film one bit.)

In fact, I considered calling this post (and wouldn't it have been clever) "Burning Bridges Playbook," because I realized that the director rarely works with the same actor twice. But then I recalled that not only was Huckabees his second (and obviously last) collaboration with Tomlin, after Flirting with Disaster, but Mark Wahlberg has worked with him three times: Three Kings, Huckabees and The Fighter. The last two were the important ones for this discussion, because Wahlberg continued on with him even after the famous Tomlin incident and his weakest film on a relatively short resume.

Besides, I didn't want to concentrate on the negative in a post about a film I liked as much as I liked this one.

Silver Linings Playbook finds Russell returning again to his success with reinvigorated genre films. In fact, as I was watching this movie, I was reminded most of last year's Crazy, Stupid, Love. Like that film, Playbook reminds us that a romantic comedy can really stick with you just by being cast and written well. And it doesn't even need to do anything particularly unconventional.

The difference is that Russell is a much better (or at least more established) filmmaker than Crazy's Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and he brings elements of his best work into elevating his own script for Playbook. Watching the film, I was also reminded how well the director does chaotic scenes with multiple people arguing, which have been prominent components of especially Disaster and The Fighter. And the arguers have been cast perfectly here. Bradley Cooper won't get an Oscar nomination, but should -- Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence probably will, and Lawrence might even win. They're all that good. Heck, even Chris Tucker is really good in a small part. Cooper and Lawrence also succeed at something you rarely see these days -- a smoldering, undeniable chemistry.

But I have to wonder if part of what makes Silver Linings Playbook so satisfying is that it may be Russell's most personal film. At least in terms of what we've already discussed about him. A guy with bipolar disorder given to fits of rage and occasional violence? That could probably describe Russell himself just as well as it could describe Cooper's Pat Solitano. Which means Russell is uniquely qualified to dramatize that fugue that takes over during a panic attack, where sounds fade to the background and a ringing of the ears surfaces to the front.

What's amazing is that Russell tackles such serious issues and gives us several scenes that are intense to the point of disturbing, while still keeping the movie essentially light and "feel good" (in the best sense of that phrase).

Only the guy who brought us Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings, right?

Here's hoping that the director has found his own silver lining in a sometimes troubled career, and the plays he draws up in the future will be more masterpieces like this one.