Monday, April 20, 2015

Serena

Alternate Title:  Silver Linings Playbook, Episode 1

One sentence synopsis:    A pair of newlywed timber magnates try to protect their business against government intrusion and auditors in 1930s West Virginia.


Things Havoc liked:  Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are two of the hottest things in Hollywood now, and wouldn't you know it, they have made something of a habit of playing opposite one another, usually to good effect. Following Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Serena is the third time these two have shown up on screen together in as many years, something I generally don't mind, given the quality of those two films and the talent of these two actors. And so in a fallow period, coming off one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life, I decided it couldn't be too terrible an idea to go with the safe choice this week.

It is the Great Depression, and George Pemberton (Cooper) has a concession for timber in the Smoky Mountains of West Virginia, with a profitable logging camp which he rules over in the manner of a logging boss in a poor state in the thirties. On a trip to New York to take out a loan to see his camp through the economic downturn, he encounters a mysterious woman named Serena, which he proceeds to marry. Both of them are veterans of the logging industry, and on returning to the mountains, both of them take an active role in managing the logging process, Serena doing so in defiance of the societal roles of the time, in daring to be a woman involved in such traditionally male activities as...

... yeah, okay, so the movie isn't exactly revolutionary in this sense, no, but in fairness it's not really about Serena's daring challenge to gender roles of West Virginia in the thirties, but about her and her husband and the lengths to which they wind up going to defend their claim from those who wish to take it away from them. Who are these evil malefactors? Well the National Park Service is one of them, in the form of Toby Jones, of Captain America, the man you hire when you want audiences to instantaneously dislike someone for being an officious nerd. It's an odd circumstance to find the National Park Service cast as the villain for trying to stop clear-cutting, but this is a historical film, and our heroes aren't all that heroic, frankly. Cooper and Lawrence do the best job they can with the material they're given, and turn in decent performances, if nothing better, as we settle in to watch them deal with the crises that afflict their business and the lengths they go to to make everything turn out the way they want.


Things Havoc disliked:  I'm... pretty sure by now you're all asleep, as the above was the most boring "things Havoc liked" section I've ever written. And the reason for that is that this movie has nothing to like whatsoever.

Oh don't get me wrong, there's not all that much to dislike either. This movie is perfectly... serviceable would perhaps be the right word. Serviceable acting, serviceable plot points, serviceable pacing, and serviceable sound design. The movie clearly wants to be something like The Piano crossed with a rural version of the Great Gatsby, but the process of watching Serena lose her damn mind as she becomes more and more obsessed with keeping what she has is not shocking or psychological or frankly even that interesting, thanks to a plot which chooses to telegraph itself fantastically at every moment. If you were, for instance, the business partner of a lumber magnate, who had just betrayed him to his enemies and informed him that you were going to destroy his company, would you then, the very next day, agree to go out on a hunting expedition with this same magnate, wherein you and he will head out into the woods of West Virginia, armed and beyond all aid from others? And having decided to do that, in a movie like this, what do you think will come about as a result? A rousing game of Parcheesi?

There's all the usual routines here, with Serena getting jealous of the bastard child that George fathered out of wedlock before meeting her, saving the life of a strange trapper and field-hand who becomes obsessed with her (Rhys Ifans, who is better here than he was in The Amazing Spiderman, but only just), and scheming to keep everything running through a series of perfectly rote "threats" that unfold one after the next. Lawrence is good at playing crazy characters, as is Cooper at dealing with them. Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle proved that much at least. But those movies surrounded the characters in question with an interesting story or setting or merely character traits that this film lacks entirely. Nothing is particularly badly done (a cameo by an almost unrecognizeable Conleth Hill is a nice touch), but there's really no actual sense of interest to the film. A story is mechanically presented to us and events transpire until they are transpiring no longer. Everything works out the way we expect it to. The end.


Final thoughts:   A couple weeks ago, I described The Gunman as one of the most routine films I'd ever seen, and yet here we are less than a month later, and the same damn verdict presents itself. Serena is a movie that was made and released on concept alone, and while the concept (putting Cooper and Lawrence together again) means that it's executed with a decent level of skill, that's all that really recommends this film. Doldrums releases sometimes conceal diamonds in the rough, or epochal disasters destined to be remembered for all time, but most of the time they produce films like this, movies that weren't strong enough to release opposite anything compelling, but not weak enough to be shelved entirely. Last year it gave us 300: Rise of an Empire and Robocop, the year before The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Oz the Great and Powerful, and the year before that one Footnote and Mission Impossible 4. Serena unquestionably belongs in this not-so-lofty company, which means that, having now completed this review, I don't expect to ever think about it again.  Nor, I suspect, will anyone else.


Final Score:  5/10


Next Time:  I just... I can't do this indie crap anymore.  I need something with explosions...

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