Serena – directed by Susanne Bier. Period Melodrama. 109 minutes Color 2015.
★
The Story: a young married couple in the early 1930’s Tennessee Smokeys strive to make their lumber business thrive against inexplicable odds.
~
A film virtually without merit, save for costumes, sets, locations.
The movie is a melodrama (which means a drama with music), because the music barges in wherever it must to supply the deficiency the actors are not providing. The direction is so stagnant one handily drives a 40-mule-team through the pauses. The director and writer fall into the fad that moving pictures demand mostly motion and little dialogue, and if movie reviews required the same I should leave off here. But humans talk. And they also respond. But here we have the two principal actors dead in one another’s water.
Bradley Cooper does not have enough personal interest to hold one’s attention on the screen as a leading man, along the lines of, say, Joel McCrea or John Wayne. As a leading man, he is empty. This might serve him well as an actor in another sort of role, but as a leading man he can do nothing more than look the part. He is the sort of hunk, such as Rory Calhoun, perfectly suited for the minor banalities of B-Westerns.
However, as a character actor, he might be something else besides, for his work in American Hustle is fun, original, quirky, and startlingly exact. As it is in Silver Linings Playbook. But not here. Not in American Sniper, either, where, maintaining groaning platitudes, he plays, as here, a vacuous man. His failure in Sniper’s failure as a film is partly due to a script which leaves unquestioned the lie of the brainwashing his character let himself in for. In and of himself, Cooper is a lead pencil. As an actor, it’s a good thing to be, but not in part such as this in Serena that needed Robert Preston. As a big lug, what he might thrive in is comedy of character. And I’d like to see him do it.
Jennifer Lawrence on her part falls into the same category of being miscast in a role that requires an actress of open sympathy, which Lawrence is not. She is entirely composed of mineral. This works well in Winter’s Bone and in American Hustle, and suggests she too is not the leading lady type. I don’t care how much “acting” she does, if you can’t care about her, she’s not right for the part. Here she plays the part of a young woman on the verge of being unhinged. Not our Jennifer. She’s not made of shale; she’s made of marble. Winter’s Bone is entirely about situation. Any actor, even one you don’t like, you’re going to root for in that situation. But Serena is not situation tragedy, and Lawrence is ill-served by it.
Certainly as an actress she is treated badly by the director. She has two crying scenes; they are technically proficient, but she evokes no sympathy. She is obliged to play the big vacuities and improbabilities of the part which is without an arc, episode by episode, each with no relation to the next. In between them, the director has her staring blankly and asking us to fill in where the music does not. It’s hard to dwell upon her. She has a mean face. How much better it would be were she slotted into the Lizabeth Scott parts of noir villainesses. Or Mockingjay! Hey! She’d be real good there! Has anyone thought of her that way!
All of this might somehow have been pumped up into life had we understood why on earth all the villains in this melodrama were out to get these two. Don’t both leads have blue eyes?
As to the audience, you could have shot moose in there. You could also have shot Cooper and Lawrence and gotten away with it nicely.