SUSANNE BIEL'S SERENA: FROM LONDON FILM FESTIVAL TO DVD

On the surface, Serena has a great deal going for it, not least the teaming of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, two of Hollywood's biggest and most-talented young stars. Made in 2012, after Silver Linings Playbook but before American Hustle, Serena languished without release, until its appearance at the London Film Festival, which also featured director Susanne Biel's smaller, but more powerful, Danish film A Second Chance. It came and went quickly in cinemas, but now its release this week on DVD might prompt some catching up and indeed re-evaluation.

Cooper plays George Pemberton, whose logging business in North Carolina is threatened by a mortgage foreclosure, and by local efforts to convert much of his timber land into a national park. On a trip home to New York to extend his loans, he meets Serena, an independent spirit he woos, weds and brings back with him to the logging camp, where he learns he's fathered a son by the cook Rachel (the talented Romanian actress Ala Ularu). Serena at first wins the camp over, not least by importing an eagle to kill the snakes which bedevil the loggers, she also loses her child. And when she learns she cannot have another, her jealousy descends like a cloud over Pemberton, Rachel and the son he tries to ignore, but can't bring himself to do so totally.

Based on a novel (which I haven't read) by Ron Rash, Serena seems pitched as a cross between There Will Be Blood (itself based on Upton Sinclair's Oil) and A Place In The Sun (based on Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, as was Josef Von Sternberg's film of the same title and many other films,including  Woody Allen's Point Break). It's very old fashioned in its morals, its class restrictions, and in the beating down of Serena's proto-feminism. The parallels between the star couple's personal crises and the business problems should reinforce each other.

At times Biel seems to be trying to channel George Stevens, who directed A Place In The Sun, or maybe one of the Kings, King Vidor or Henry King: big movies with epic struggles against the land and epic struggles with love and hate. But at heart, the story is more Erskine Caldwell than Dreiser or Sinclair, with Serena being distracted by (and distracting, to the loss of a limb) grunting fundamentalist hard-man Rhys Ifans, whose one-note performance is a bass note, and Cooper's love for Serena driving a wedge between him and his right-hand man (David Dencik—who ought to be next in line to play Poirot) who nurses a severe crush on him. The steam that rises from all this is echoed mostly in Biel's fascination with showing literal smoke over the Smoky Mountains (with the Czech Republic standing in nicely for North Carolina and Tennessee).

The story is the film's release was delayed because the producers couldn't figure out how to sell it. And even though it's only 102 minutes, it seems longer, as if it wants to be (or was) more epic in scope. I wonder, because Rachel's father is played by Kim Bodnia, himself a fairly hot commodity after The Bridge, yet he doesn't have a single line in the picture. The way Ularu is kept silent virtually until the climatic scenes makes me think there are scenes missing that would have built more tension in the camp itself, which as it stands is merely a pretty set in a pretty location. At the same there is a lot of symbolism (not least the eagle and the snake, or various logging accidents) suggested but never really developed. And there seems to be something missing in Toby Jones' sheriff, played as Charles Laughton's mini-me.

This is very much the case of the whole being much less than the sum of its parts. Biel appears to have enjoyed the wider scope this story suggested, but in the end it has a very narrow focus on the stars, to the point some of their amour fou conflict becomes repetitive. But with two of the most marketable stars in the world, this should not be a bad thing. But I wonder. Lawrence inhabits roles in a way Cooper doesn't quite; he seemed to be always a step shy of letting go fully in Silver Linings, and here he shows a fatal weakness which he ought to be able to convey as a strength. But when Lawrence's strength transmutes into a Lady Macbeth madness, Cooper has no answer. What I thought was a holding back seems, in the faceof Lawrence's energy, a weakness: there is a soft core to Cooper's characters, to the extent I was thinking Michael Murphy as I watched this. Serena is an intriguing, interesting film, but one that raises more questions than it answers.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK: I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH CONTINUES

I actually reviewed Silver Linings Playbook back in November for the 'three points' section of our Americarnage podcast (that's Americarnage.co.uk, or via Itunes), but because I was also talking about Elliott Carter's death, the discussion was edited out. Since then, the film won the BAFTA for best adapted screenplay, which surprised me because in Britain the 'Playbook' part of the title of the film was virtually disappeared, and the football elements usually put British audiences, and critics, off. But when I sat down to write about the film, I found myself thinking first about the appeal David O Russell, and the odd fact that in the past 18 years, he done only six feature films.

Spanking The Monkey could almost be the quintessential independent first picture; I remember it blowing me away at the London Film Festival, primarily because of the way it managed to approach a taboo subject, and some sensitive relations, with both sensitivity and humour. And I was so impressed with Alberta Watson's performance, and have since watched her nail many parts, but not the big-ticket one that she deserved.

Spanking The Monkey foreshadowed the Russell who specialises in off-beat relationships, which is what Silver Linings is all about, though its characters aren't as willfully offbeat as those in other comedies he wrote and directed, like Flirting With Disaster (of which more shortly) or I Heart Huckabees. On the serious side, Russell also made Three Kings, still the best movie anyone's done about the American 'conquest' of the Middle East, even though it was made before the last two invasions, and Kathryn Bigelow's essays into them. Three Kings was, like Silver Linings, adapted from other sources, while The Fighter, which got Russell his first Oscar nomination for best director, was his only film where he doesn't have a writing credit. It also got Melissa Leo, an underappreciated New York actress right out of the Alberta Watson template, another much-deserved Oscar (though more deserved for Frozen River!)

A cynic might think Silver Linings is a combination of the two: the offbeat comedy which Russell creates himself, and a sporting subplot and metaphor to make it more interesting on the mainstream level. But I found that, despite enjoying the film for the most part, my cynicism hit a mother lode of Silver Linings.

It's the kind of film where everyone is a bit off, which is supposed to make them funny to comfortable audiences. But where it doesn't work is that Bradley Cooper, who has anger issues (inherited, obviously, from his father Robert DeNiro, who's been banned from Eagles' games for fighting) never really seems angry enough. He's acting hard, but he keeps this reserve of rational intelligence, or likeability, behind his eyes. We can believe the violence in DeNiro beneath the hamming because he's DeNiro, but with Cooper, we think there's something more going on. If you might see a lot of DeNiro's performance in Meet The Fockers here, it isn't surprised, since Russell supposedly did script-doctoring on that film, and as we'll see, there is a lot of revisiting going on in this film.

What's new and different is Jennifer Lawrence, although again, as a widow and a 'recovering sex addict' her character Tiffany is given faults too good to be true, from the film-maker's point of view. But Lawrence does an amazing job of projecting her ultimate vulnerability—I rather doubt she gets the Oscar this year, but I wouldn't complain if she did, since she so richly deserved one for Winter's Bone. She gets the best lines, of course, and her letter to Pat is corny but may be the best moment of the film (apart from any moments with Jacki Weaver, as Cooper's mother and DeNiro's wife, enduring them). In fact the contrasting marriages; Pat's best friend is married to Tiffany's sister; she dominates him, and they live an upwardly-mobile life that's killing him to maintain. It's a contrast to Pat's parents (Tiffany's parents barely register) and everyone else in the lower-middle class neighbourhood they live in, but it's a sharper contrast to our kooky couple...at least until the end.

But what really doesn't work is the integration of the football, which is sloppy—I complained on Americarnage about DeNiro making the show's big bet on a game whose point spread would not have been fixed at the time, and you could notice the anachronistic Eagles' jerseys in the crowd-- but what was in there for a gratuitious laugh was the whole Indian Eagles fans and the fight—since one of them is Pat's therapist, you'd think his fighting at the stadium would make more of a point toward the story, but it basically just in there for a cheap ethnic laugh. Too bad they weren't playing the Redskins.

And what is especially cynical of me is thinking that the whole 'Dancing With The Stars' subplot is redolent of Slumdog Millionaire. Yes, you say, but this is what America does, pattern their lives and live their hopes to the incessant beat of so-called 'reality' television, but to me this is simply something up to date and popular on which Russell could hitch the basic scenario of Flirting With Disaster: the love triangle between the kooky guy (Ben Stiller, on whom Cooper is an improvement), the wife who doesn't care (Patricia Arquette) and the kooky woman to whom the kooky guy is attracted (Tea Leoni). There it was a quest for his parents, here it is a quest to get his job and wife back, even though the latter doesn't want him.

You can see where the novel might have appealed to Russell, and beneath the triangle he recognised were the extra plotlines, the rehab requirements, the dancing competition, and most of all the football. But really they don't go much of anywhere, especially the football, which is laden with potential metaphors for this story which went untapped. Similarly, the dancing, in the end, becomes its own payoff and telegraphs its own ending.

As I said, Silver Linings Playbook is entertaining enough; it simply does carry the weight of its own storyline to any sort of 'best picture' degree. Which is why I find it surprising he's been nominated for best director because his direction is completely in service to the screenplay, and the set-pieces are very mundane. I think that's deliberate, because as I say, I think Russell's most interested in his triangle, and everything else is just a series of devices to get him to the payoff. Besides, Flirting With Disaster II isn't a very catchy title.