Serena

Serena is a Depression-era western—or rather “eastern” since it takes place in North Carolina—about a small time timber baron (Bradley Cooper) who marries a beautiful but complicated woman named Serena (Jennifer Lawrence). Directed by the renowned Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers, After the Wedding, In a Better World) from the novel by the American poet and author Ron Rash (The World Made Straight, The Cove), Serena falls short of its potential as an engaging and lasting romantic period drama. Expectations are justifiably high for this film not only because of the director but also due to the reuniting of Cooper and Lawrence, the stars of the Oscar winning romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Though both actors make plausible 1920s era North Carolinians, their natural chemistry doesn’t click in this serious, destined-to-be-together context the way it did when they played mismatched lovers in the distinctly off-kilter Silver Linings. 

While the film is beautiful to look at (the Czech Republic stands in for late 20’s North Carolina), the narrative is clumsily structured. Bier and screenwriter Christopher Kyle (whose unimpressive credits include Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker) dole out the narrative with what seems like deliberate awkwardness. Many sequences unfold with a slow, literary pace full of heavy doses of symbolism. Others scenes—many that are critical to the plot—are rushed through without spending the necessary time to make character motivations clear or credible. The end result is a film that, while not boring or pretentious, fails to earn the sense of elegiac tragedy it so clearly aspires to.