Should You Go See Jennifer Lawrence And Bradley Cooper Go Full Old-School In ‘Serena’?

Jennifer Lawrence, currently in cinemas as post-traumatised franchise cog Katniss Everdeen, has a second movie out now. If The Hunger Games is a paradigmatic Hollywood blockbuster, Serena represents something altogether more old-fashioned.

Its Danish director, Susanne Bier, specialises in finely wrought melodramas including Brothers (2004) and Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner In A Better World (2010). Based on a 2008 novel by Ron Rash, Serena is both tasteful and torrid, both obvious and enigmatic, in a way inescapably reminiscent of the Hollywood melodramas made during the period in which it’s set.

The film reunites Lawrence with Bradley Cooper – opposite whom she won her Oscar – as newlywed timber magnates in the 1930s. George and Serena Pemberton will stop at nothing to protect their empire – even murder. But their passionate love turns tragic when Serena suffers a late miscarriage that leaves her unable to conceive again, and then discovers that George has become fixated on the illegitimate son he sired before he met her.

Filmed in 2012, between its stars’ appointments with David O Russell in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Serena has been awaiting release for most of this year. A cynic might conclude it was deliberately slipped into cinemas now to piggyback on Hunger Games buzz. After all, it has a gorgeous North Carolina mountain setting, and Lawrence’s nature-loving title character is even a ‘girl on fire’ – Serena carries burn scars from the house fire that killed her entire family.

But the notion that audiences will go see ‘a Jennifer Lawrence movie’ – any JLaw movie! – also recalls how the old studio system groomed its stars to embody particular charismatic qualities. Basically, I wanted to see Serena because I like Jennifer Lawrence and I like Bradley Cooper. They’re two great tastes that taste great together.

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An Old Hollywood Reliance On Subtext

George and Serena’s passion is conveyed in impressionistic sex scenes – especially a bathtub sequence that focuses on the female orgasm. There’s also a palpable atmosphere of menace. In the Pemberton timber camp, death seems to lurk everywhere: by axe, falling tree, shotgun, knife, snakebite, animal attack or runaway lumber train.

But it’s only an atmosphere. The film is oddly choppy, reserved and bloodless. Violence and nudity are tastefully glimpsed and suggested rather than revelled in. Whole plotlines appear to have been pruned down to subtexts. It’s as if Bier felt somehow constrained from entering more lurid territory.

From 1934 until the late 1960s, Hollywood films really were constrained. The Motion Picture Production Code (popularly known as the Hays Code after the chief censor who first enforced it) banned profanity, nudity, prolonged and passionate kissing, homosexuality, interracial sex, childbirth, venereal diseases, illicit drugs and any “wilful offence to any nation, race or creed”. The Code also insisted that authority figures be treated with respect, and violence, crime and extramarital sex be portrayed as immoral and unappealing. Characters who partook in vice were to be punished.

In response, filmmakers developed a symbolic repertoire that could convey scandalous meanings through implication; and Serena is full of such suggestions – many of them corny. For instance, we read George’s business partner Buchanan (David Dencik) as gay – and sexually jealous of Serena – because he wears cravats, smokes gold-tipped cigarettes and says he’s a “bachelor”. And there’s something subliminally erotic to Serena’s relationship with her hillbilly henchman Galloway (Rhys Ifans): an intimacy forged by eyes and hands.

George has his heart set on hunting a mountain lion. Untamed, beautiful, dangerous when you get close – now, who could that big cat represent? Similarly, Serena insists on getting an eagle, which only she may train, to kill venomous snakes. Hmmm… it’s almost as if she wants to rid these woods of anyone untrustworthy.

We can tell this is a modern story because it cheers for its antiheroic lovebirds. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Toby Jones) – a baby-faced conservationist – is painted as the story’s villain for trying to catch the Pembertons doing something illegal so he can turn their land into a national park. But the ending is surprisingly neat and moralistic, with innocence and justice rising above corruption and revenge.

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An Old Hollywood Focus On Star Power

Today, actors are admired for vanishing into their roles, drawing on empathy, special-effects makeup and stunt weight management. Bradley Cooper has an MFA in Method acting, and as a student was an earnest Inside the Actors Studio audience member. Jennifer Lawrence is also praised for her intuitive, expressive acting.

But Serena isn’t a naturalistic film. Much like the Golden Age celebrity vehicles that wove plotlines around the stars’ unchanging signature personas, it seems calculated to put Coops’n’JLaw in the same frame. Bier wants us to recognise them, and enjoy watching them do their best 1930s impressions.

Which I did! I especially enjoyed George’s to-the-point horseback seduction: “I think we should be married.” Next scene: sex scene. Serena has a similarly crisp manner of speech, delivered in Lawrence’s familiar throaty tones. Not even the sight of her husband’s pregnant ex-lover rattles her: she merely says, “Nothing that happened before even exists.”

It’s striking how much Serena leans on and luxuriates in the close-up. When we’re in love, we obsessively study our lover’s face, as if to remind ourselves, “You’re here… with me.” And what makes film mesmerising is its ability to make us fall in love with beautiful actors by displaying, on a grand scale, the details of their faces that can usually only be observed at intimate proximity. Bier’s camera caresses her stars’ faces, admiring their material presence as much as their shifting emotions.

As a kid, I often puzzled over why Disney cartoons depicted a prince’s skin tone much darker than a princess’s. But I found myself noticing these ‘classical’ sorts of contrasts in Serena. George is a stolid, bewildered tragic hero who acts on impulses he only barely understands; and we intuit this in the preternatural blueness of Cooper’s eyes, the smile that plays uncertainly on his lips, and the crinkles just beginning to texture his 37-year-old face.

Meanwhile Lawrence, at 22, seems to wear her wonderfully pale and smooth skin as an inscrutable mask stretched over those cheekbones. She makes Serena coolly watchful, her thoughts mysterious. The costuming furthers the contrast: George wears rough, outdoorsy tweed suits, while Serena is slippery in creamy satin blouses and nightgowns. It’s when Serena begins to unravel in rage and grief that this central tension slackens, and the film dips fatally into silliness.

It’s a minor film – one that probably won’t ignite at the box office, and will retrospectively be seen as filler on both actors’ résumés. But even this reminds me of the Old Hollywood system, when actors were locked into studio contracts to make many films whose quality varied wildly. We may bemoan today’s franchise-driven Hollywood system, but they churned out mediocre, cookie-cutter pictures 80 years ago, for sure.

Serena is surprisingly flinty in its treatment of its venal characters. But as cinematic spectacle, it satisfies. Its elliptical, submerged themes mightn’t stand up under closer scrutiny, but its luminous stars positively demand our attention.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She founded online pop culture magazine The Enthusiast, and author of the book Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion and Fit. She blogs on style, history and culture atFootpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.

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Serena is out now.