Serena

Serena seems to have evaded its audience by risking an unusual experiment in form.  
      One scene relates the post-Depression North Carolina to a contemporary concern: the battle between ecologists and the commercial exploiters of the natural world. But that’s the only modern element in the film. Even there it goes against our current grain by arraying our sympathies with (horrors) the lumber baron, George Pendleton (Bradley Cooper). His love and new wife Serena (Jennifer Lawrence) loves trees but shares his ardor for lumber profits, especially his plan to expand into the virgin wilds of Brazil. The environmentalist lefties here are played as homely schemers, fumble bunnies and betrayers. The issue may be modern but the film's perspective is deliberately archaic -- to fit its ancient genre. 

The titular heroine tips the film away from modern storytelling back into the tone and structure of the classic medieval ballad. It's an old-fashioned story with only that one political scene to root it in our present. For Serena is not so much a modern heroine as a classical ballad figure, a mysterious woman with destructive powers and an other-worldly mien. 

Serena is a force of nature. She rides a white stallion as if it were a loveseat. She trains eagles to destroy the rattlesnakes. She reads people with an animal’s intuition, whether George’s frustrated-lover partner or the girl carrying George’s child. She has an eagle eye. Serena's face seems mask-like until George finally confronts the rumoured alien predator — a panther. Then Lawrence’s face and makeup make sense. She’s like the panther, an exotic untamed, murderous outsider. The feral animal and her George die in mutual destruction — in each other’s arms. 

But that’s George and the cat. The jig up, their epic extra-ethical passion thwarted, Serena burns herself alive, consigned to the ashes from which she rose phoenix-like from the earlier fire which consumed her family. Serena certainly is not serene but then neither is that nature — red in tooth and claw — that we gloss over when we “preserve” its wild forces as a Hallmark card national park. Clear-eyed director Bier’s Nature is blood-thirsty without people around, torn with mutual predators, and even bloodier when humans bring their own lusts, greed and mishap.     

Set aside that one debate over exploiting nature and this film is like a ballad. The characters are abstractions, the passions primitive, the narrative elliptical, skipping scenes like the heroes’ courtship and wedding and the disclosure of George’s illegitimate son. The incidents pass in a formal rhythm, detailing a story that has been happening since time immemorial. The gifted seer Galloway (Rhys Ifans) drifts through the narrative with macabre, invincible force, joined with Serena by bis mother’s prophecy. She’s La belle dame and he’s devotedly sans merci.  

     To enjoy this superb film you have to take it on its own terms.