Serena

Whup-whup-whup-whup. Let me put an image in your head. Think of a writer mad with fever, wide piercing eyes, sweaty hair plastered to their forehead, tongue lolling, racing about the room frantically rewriting the last twenty pages of what was a pretty decent drama, as the actual writer Christopher Kyle (K-19 Widowmaker, Alexander), adapting Ron Rash’s novel, chases with a net, begging the insanity to stop.

That’s the only explanation as to what could possibly have happened to the last act of Serena as the story succumbs to the most baffling decision-making in some time. Whup-whup.

Bradley Cooper is a shady owner of a Depression-era North Carolina logging company that has plans of expanding into Brazil. Just as his current project comes up against Toby Jones’ sheriff/conservationist Cooper’s head is turned by Jennifer Lawrence’s eponymous heroine - a feisty, ambitious type who’s tougher than the redneck loggers in her employ. She certainly earns the respect of Rhys Ifans, a scraggly mountain mystic of sorts, and shows lazy Ned Dennehy a thing or two. And she’s prepared to push her husband into doing the unthinkable when partner David Dencik betrays him to the authorities...

Post Brothers and After The Wedding, Susanne Bier moved from Denmark to Hollywood and has since failed to rekindle the old flame. Serena looked to turn all that around. It looks beautiful: the rolling mist coming over the foreboding mountains that surround the logging camp is like a postcard and the camp itself, with its wooden buildings and ankle-deep muddy passes, looks like a forgotten town in the Old West; it certainly has the era’s fait accompli attitude to death and horrific injury.

It’s a mean world getting meaner and the story builds slowly around this, adding layers and bits and pieces to the well-drawn characters. Lawrence’s proto-feminist is given the most welly but she’s so much more than Strong Independent Woman who says things like, "(the men) need to know it was a woman who tamed the eagle," and subtly allows vulnerability to penetrate the tough exterior. Cooper might look a little too Movie Star for the dirty setting but he and Lawrence carry over the sizzle from Silver Linings Playbook and both lose themselves in Serena’s Shakespearean melodrama. It was working beautifully...

... and then that mad writer snatched the paper. Whup, etc.