SERENA REVIEW
Unlikable characters, smoky landscape create blur of grey where black and white issues matter
Serena Rating: Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Toby Jones, Rhys Ifans, David Dencik Directed by: Susanne Bier Running time: 109 minutes
Having lost the vast majority of their own wilderness to centuries of human settlement, Europeans seem to have a romantic fascination with images of the North American frontier. Eager to put a foot in the cold mud of the uncivilized world, they fly to the far North, spend weeks sipping cocoa in the tundra and giggle themselves silly on snowmobiles in rural Quebec.
For them, bitter cold, big trees and log cabins are exotic things that offer a tingle of romantic sensation, which goes a long way toward explaining why Susanne Bier’s Serena unlaces like a slack bodice.
A feverish romance set against the backdrop of the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina in the early 1930s, the story centres on George Pemberton ( Bradley Cooper), a self- made timber baron looking to increase his fortune by securing vast swaths of uncut forest. George and his partner Buchanan ( David Dencik) have already invested thousands in their new operation and rail line, so when a group of locals band together in a bid to create a national park to preserve the area, Pemberton Lumber Co. suddenly faces a life- or- death situation.
It’s a familiar story, but what makes this yarn, based on Ron Rash’s novel, so interesting is how the company’s struggle for survival begins to claim human casualties.
With his good looks and manly frame, Pemberton is the very picture of a bootstraps success story and an ideal symbol of the American dream. He works hard. He outwits his competitors and if he can find an edge, he’ll use it, but the character appears to be a gentleman when we first meet him with his sleeves rolled up and his back to the wall. Proof of his supposedly noble nature is evident in his quest to kill a wild cat stalking his crews, because in that ancient stance of man against beast, we’re reminded of old colonial India and the pasty white men who killed tigers in the Queen’s name. Pemberton is the colonist but it’s not the people he is conquering. It’s the landscape, and director Bier does her best to turn the set of a small lumber camp into an epic battlefield soaked in blood.
To give the abstracts real dimension, we are offered a series of convenient characters who appropriate different facets of the drama, from the sternfaced sheriff ( Toby Jones) who speaks for the people, to the rancid old tracker ( Rhys Ifans) who believes in black magic, and most notably Serena ( Jennifer Lawrence). The sexy daughter of a lumberman, she proves to be a force of nature.
Serena completely bewitches George on their first meeting, and soon after, they are married and head up to the muddy camp, where her presence immediately causes emotional tremors. As the ground starts rumbling, we’re sympathetic to the handsome couple and their bid to make a better, and more profitable, future for themselves. But something is off, and that goes for the whole movie.
The Academy Award- winning Bier ( Brothers, In a Better World) was probably trying to make a movie similar in feel to The Piano, but it never comes together because there’s too much going on beneath the surface. The whole national park subplot is confusing and blurs the blacks and whites required to generate sympathy, and every character suffers a similarly grey fate.
There’s no doubt most of this is by design. Pemberton, the individual, and Pemberton, the company, are interchangeable until our wouldbe hero is forced to make a moral decision. As a portrait of a particular moment in U. S. history, when industry was rising from the ashes of the Depression and reassessing values, Serena is a calculated study of loss.
On paper, it works perfectly. On the big screen, by contrast, it’s hard to reconcile. By the end, we barely like anyone in this smoky landscape, let alone care about what happens to them.