How do you make a period epic with the red-hot team of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper
that ends up bowing on iTunes and other video-on-demand outlets a month ahead of its (likely very limited) US theatrical release on March 27?
Failed Oscar bait — shot in 2012 and reportedly shunned by major American distributors because it’s such a downer — “Serena” is a handsome
but lumbering (in more ways than one) melodrama that casts the duo as a ruthless North Carolina timber magnate and his sexy but troubled wife,
a lumber heiress from Colorado who was orphaned in a fire.
Three-time Oscar nominee Cooper struggles with a Boston accent in Susanne Bier’s relentlessly grim and humorless art film,
while his George Pemberton has to deal with 1929 environmentalists; a suspicious sheriff (Toby Jones); money problems; a closeted, cravat-wearing manager (David Dencik) who betrays him because he’s jealous of Serena; and an ax-wielding wife given to instructing his employees how to cut down trees.
Lawrence looks great as a peroxided femme fatale in Signe Sejlund’s gorgeous costumes, and there is palpable heat in her sex scenes with frequent co-star Cooper. (“Serena’’ was shot between “Silver Linings Playbook’’ and “American Hustle,” and the pair is teaming again with David O. Russell for “Joy.”)
But for all her versatility as an Oscar-winning actress, even Lawrence has trouble making believable an eagle-training independent woman who goes mad after a miscarriage and the discovery that she may have to share her husband’s love with his newborn illegitimate son. So of course she sends a mystical hunting guide (Rhys Ifans) to kill the baby and his mother (Ana Ularu) with a knife.
“The only thing that frightens me is the thought that you don’t trust me,’’ Serena tells George at one point, and there’s lots more absurdly stilted dialogue like that from credited screenwriter Christopher Kyle (one of the collaborators on “Alexander,’’ and not the Navy SEAL Cooper plays in “American Sniper’’), working from a critically acclaimed novel by Ron Rash.
Bier — who directed the Danish, Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winning “In a Better World’’ — seems to have been influenced (like the writer of “Gone Girl’’) by the Technicolor noir classic “Leave Her to Heaven’’ (1945), going as far as having Serena and George meet on horseback. There are also distant echoes of the second half of “Gone With the Wind’’ in the timber-boss-lady portion of Lawrence’s performance.
But unlike either of those films, the choppily edited and thoroughly wooden “Serena’’ fails to catch fire, even when everything literally goes up in flames. Basically, it’s “Cold Mountain” without Renée Zellweger.
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Source: Los Angeles Times
