David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook, apart from having one of the most pointlessly awkward titles in recent memory, is in effect two separate films. On the one hand, it's a comedy-drama about two very pretty, slightly crazy people coming to know each other and maybe figuring out how to be better together, and on the other, a sports movie in which those characters have to train for a big competition. Neither of those two films is terrible by any means, but they are so clumsily grafted together that it winds up being the cinematic equivalent of a set of shelves that have been built without the use of a spirit level. It functions well enough, but everything is uneven to the detriment of the whole and to no discernible purpose.