Lawrence can't pull off Serena
Film
Serena (MA15+)
2 stars
Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Rhys Ifans
DIRECTOR SUSANNE BIER
REVIEW PIER LEACH
Prolific Danish director Susanne Bier, best known for such bracing, unforgettable dramas as Open Hearts, After the Wedding and Brothers (all written by Anders Thomas Jensen), hasn't fared nearly as well in her forays into English-language films.
Despite a cast led by Benicio Del Toro and Halle Berry, 2007's Things We Lost In The Fire wasn't even released here and her 2012 Pierce Brosnan-starring film All You Need Is Love (also written by Jensen), was one of the wettest and silliest autumnal romances in recent memory - even with its very pretty Italian setting.
So it is disappointing her latest effort is Serena, a film made in 2012 and whose delayed release appears to be riding on the box office tidal wave of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and the fizz from David O. Russell's Oscar-scooping American Hustle. In other words, on the back of its stars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.
Again, Bier picks a beautiful locale, this time in the mountains of North Carolina during the Great Depression (it was in fact filmed in the Czech Republic). She has also gathered a fine ensemble, with Lawrence and Cooper joined by Toby Jones and Rhys Ifans.
But somehow her frontier timber-industry melodrama, adapted by Christopher Kyle (Alexander) from Ron Rash's 2008 novel, moves quite abruptly from intriguing to absurd.
Its title character is certainly interesting. Lawrence is a young actress who specialises in strong women - right from her breakout, Oscar-nominated role in Winter's Bone, through The Hunger Games, to her slightly unhinged turns in both Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle.
It is easy to see why the role might have appealed to her; Serena is both formidable and, as it turns out, more than slightly deranged. But not even Lawrence can pull her off by the end.
Cooper's George Pemberton, a young logging industry entrepreneur, first catches a glimpse of the statuesque blonde at a horse-riding event and his first words to her are a marriage proposal.
At first it seems like a match made in heaven. She moves with him to his logging town in North Carolina and quickly sets about making the business more efficient, teaching the men how to chop down trees the way her father - a captain of the same industry before his death - taught her, and training an eagle to keep the deadly rattlesnakes in check.
It is a fascinating dynamic; she's unafraid to whip the men into shape and her husband fully supports her, even if his business partner Buchanan (David Dencik) takes umbrage and she causes a few raised eyebrows among the workers, including the clairvoyant Galloway (Ifans). She is like a latter day Scarlett O'Hara, savvy, ruthless, strong and prepared to get her hands dirty.
When Buchanan betrays Pemberton, Serena convinces her husband to take matters into his own hands. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Jones) is sniffing around the couple's business dealings.
It really starts to come apart, however, when Serena suffers a late-stage miscarriage with her first child and learns she will have no more. Pemberton has fathered another baby in the camp prior to meeting his wife, and Serena, who has suffered personal tragedy on a large scale in the past, becomes obsessed with the child.
It is right about then that the film hurtles over a tipping point of narrative disbelief from which it cannot be salvaged. Until then, the film's frontier period romance is quite captivating on the strength of its central relationship, in which Lawrence and Cooper are convincingly matched.
But it unravels at an alarming pace as the ludicrous plot developments kick in. It doesn't matter that Morten Soborg's cinematography is entrancing, it doesn't matter that the cast tries valiantly to make it work. No number of Oscar winners can make good a script that becomes as mad as its central character.
Bier has pulled off eye-popping plot twists in the past; she doesn't succeed here.
Serena is in cinemas now.
