You know it’s funny how film studios work sometimes. They get the rights to a fairly popular novel. They then get a script with a solid setting, an Oscar-winning director, two of the biggest actors in the business today, and a sizable enough budget to put together the whole production. Then after all the filming ends and the editing begins the studio heads realize the film is a massive piece shit and they begin burying it faster than Hilary Clinton buries an email scandal.
It appears a studio has dug themselves another grave of this kind with Serena.
The film stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence and immediately you may be confused. “Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were in another movie together? How did I not hear about this?” I can hear you asking. You see reader sometimes a solid cast, or in this case two actors, doesn’t always make for a good film, and when this happens the studio can do two things: Promote it with decent enough trailers and hope people go see it because of the actors or cut their losses and begin to distance themselves from it like it’s a red-headed bastard stepchild.
Guess which one happened to Serena?
Set in the early years of the Great Depression, George Pemberton (Cooper) owns a timber business in North Carolina. After falling in love with Serena (Lawrence) at first sight he takes her with him to work with him, and things begin to fall apart.
That summary of the film is actually more interesting than the film itself. While it may sound like an interesting look into the deterioration of a relationship, it isn’t. If you want that, go watch Blue Valentine, if you want to be bored shitless for almost two hours watching a film about timber, panthers, “love” and an illegitimate son complete with terrible characters, then give Serena a shot.
Cooper and Lawrence don’t seem to be particularly interested in the whole project. Both are about as wooden as the trees that surround them during the film and both have no chemistry whatsoever, which is shocking considering how great they were in Silver Linings Playbook. Lawrence plays a character who can be described as bi-polar, and not in a convincing way, her character’s motivations shift constantly throughout the film. All the while Cooper’s character, the protagonist, is one who brings home his new wife just after he impregnates a local woman, which immediately makes him a fucking asshole. So our two lead characters are a “crazy” woman and an asshole who don’t work well together, give bland performances and have accents straight out of a Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby? Awesome.
The rest of the cast really aren’t that memorable. Toby Jones gets a mention, only because I’m not sure why he’s in this film. Maybe after working on movies like Harry Potter and Captain America he thought acting in this movie counted as taking a trip to the spa. He doesn’t have to try. He shows up, acts a little squirmy, and collects his paycheck. I can’t really be mad at him, it’s easy money. Wouldn’t you want to get paid to act in a film where a line of dialogue two minutes in gives away the end of the movie?
The story these characters occupy is, arguably, the worst part about Serena. Say what you want about the performances, and I have, but the character motivations and overall plot really don’t help matters. There are plot points involving timber, national parks, babies, illegitimate children, love, lies, murder, bribery, panthers, miscarriages, traumatic childhoods, and someone losing a limb all in under two hours, and yet the movie makes no effort to be entertaining and hop scotches these plot points to make them all seem relevant, taking time away from anything interesting.
While some of these issues could be attributed to its source material, a novel written by Ron Rash, the pacing and overstuffed plot also fall on the backs of writer Christopher Kyle and director Susanne Bier. Kyle writes the film like it’s a made for TV movie, with dialogue that doesn’t interest and, as said before, too many sub plots and nothing monumental happens to catch your interest, and when something big does happen you see it coming from a mile away, his script never throws a curveball at you. All the whole Bier’s envisioning for the script is a lot of beautiful cinematography of the forest but the rest is a colorless world that doesn’t catch you eye or peak your interest and doing a terrible job of balancing all of the elements the plot throws at you.
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have already rebounded from this film, with Cooper nabbing an Oscar nomination for American Sniper and Lawrence doing the same for Joy, and they will both have plenty of projects in the future. But Serena will be a massive question mark on their careers as well as everyone else involved. It’s really a question of how did this all go so horrible wrong? How could they take a film with these actors and make it so boring and lifeless? I’m not sure how they did it, but Serena found a way.
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