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Review: Serena

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

The great mystery surrounding Serena has nothing to do with its plot, which sees Bradley Cooper’s timber merchant, George Pemberton, whisk his new bride, Jennifer Lawrence’s titular Serena, away to his logging operation up in the North Carolina mountains.  Out there in that remote wilderness, the newlyweds’ marriage, mental states and lives are tested by the barbarity of human emotion and the savagery of nature. And yet the greatest interest in Serena prior to its release was why this film, directed by Academy Award winner Susanne Bier and starring two of the world’s biggest stars, had stayed unreleased for over two years.

The answer, it seems, lies in the film’s script. A dark and poorly constructed mess of coincidence, disjointed plot threads and overstretched metaphors, it leaves the film floundering without direction or purpose. Like with the story’s remote patch of overvalued forests, you have to wonder why the film’s leads were so drawn to it in the first placed.

The problems, which plague Serena for its torturously long two hour run time, are evident in its opening minutes. Rattling through the logging company’s financial problems, the beginnings of a hunting subplot, the meet-cute between our lovers, a wedding, and an unexpected pregnancy all with the speed and subtlety of a falling tree, the film leaves us disorientated and detached from both the characters and the story. An engaging emotional arc takes a back seat to the film’s many plot contrivances, with Bier dragging the audience into the darkest corners of human nature without bothering to illuminate the way.

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Lacking in dramatic consequence, the storytelling is listless, misdirected, and almost impossible to care about. Crucial, devastating events occur entirely by chance, and most plot points have little causative connection to one another. You get the sense that the film’s events could be rearranged in any number of ways and it could still arrive at the same conclusion. Furthermore, Serena’s two main narrative elements — that of the logging camps declining fortunes and Pemberton’s illegitimate son — never meaningfully connect, and so both limp along without purpose or direction. You’ll wish Bier would do us all a favour and put them both out of their misery.

This disconnect between character and narrative unsurprisingly leads to a disjointed lead performance. Lawrence attempts to ground Serena in the common ground between the character’s conflicting romantic and the pragmatic traits, but the material continually works against her. You feel a stronger interpretation of the character was lost in the editing room, as Bier seems determined to contrive grand standing scenes for her lead actress, demanding go-for-broke acting but without bothering to play the emotional beats which would tie these moments together. The result is a performance which plays more like a show reel than a character study. Bradley Cooper fares better thanks to his more manageable arc, which grounds the film in something resembling an emotional reality, but he remains an uninteresting and ineffectual hero.

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However, the most depressing thing about Serena is its attempt to cloak itself in metaphors in order to ascribe meaning to its pithy story. The film opens with Pemberton’s hunting party tracking the last panther in the North Carolina forests; we’re warned that the panther kills by clawing out the heart of its victim. Might Pemberton meet a similar fate at the hands of a human predator? It’s a metaphor as thin as it is obvious. The film is too in love with its wilderness setting to see that the forests, as beautiful and untouched as they are, hold nothing more compelling or insightful than the human drama unfolding there. The clumsy metaphor only serves to draw attention to the shallowness of the film’s insights.

Ultimately, Serena’s greatest sin is not knowing what it is. The film thinks it is telling a timeless human story about loneliness and ambition, when really it’s a poorly constructed B-grade thriller with delusions of grandeur. Perhaps this was one best left on the shelf.

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