Serenity
Kinda makes you wonder what Forrest was tempted to do all those years on that shrimping boat.
Cast of Characters:
Baker Dill – Matthew McConaughey
Karen Zariakas – Anne Hathaway
Frank Zariakas – Jason Clarke
Constance – Diane Lane
Duke – Djimon Hounsou
Reid Miller – Jeremy Strong
Director – Steven Knight
Screenplay – Steven Knight
Producer – Steven Knight, Greg Shapiro & Guy Heeley
Rated R for language throughout, sexual content, and some bloody images.
On the island of Plymouth, Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) is a game fisherman for hire, who’s struggling to make ends meet. To get by, he offers paid trips out to sea to catch tuna, all the while searching for his own elusive “white whale” himself, a large tuna he’s named “Justice”.
You’ll wanna remember that very, very, oh-so very, extremely subtle attempt at foreshadowing.
Meanwhile, after porking one of the female locals, Constance (Diane Lane), to earn some quick prostituted cash, Dill unexpectedly has a run-in with his ex-wife Karen Zariakas (Anne Hathaway). Karen, however, isn’t here on Plymouth for just a pleasurable getaway. She has a proposition to offer Dill, and the money involved makes it an offer impossible to refuse. As the target of much physical and emotional abuse from her drunk husband Frank (Jason Clarke), Karen is fed up taking his hits. Turning to Dill, she asks him to take Frank out on a “fishing trip”… Fredo Corleone style. In return, she’ll give him $10 million. Though refusing her offer at first, when she reveals to him that Frank’s cruel behavior involves their son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh)… well…
…
It just. got. personal.
Serenity is the type of film that has all the ingredients for Oscar bait. Oscar-worthy cast? Check. Oscar-nominated writer/director? Check. Murder mystery noir plot? Check. October release? Check – oh… wait a minute.
Originally, Serenity was scheduled to be released on September 28, 2018, but Aviron Pictures pushed the release date back to October 19, 2018. Perhaps to push it further into the crop of Oscar competition that is typically released in the fall? Apparently not, ’cause at the last minute, Aviron yanked Serenity from its October release and pushed it back all the way to January of this year, and not just January, but the dead end of January. If that there doesn’t convince you of the studio’s complete and total lack of faith in this film, the review embargo they slapped on movie critics until the day of release should be the nail in the coffin.
Now, let’s not be too hasty here. We’ve seen studios show little to no faith in their projects only to be proven wrong by the critics and (or) the box office. The first John Wick film is a great example in recent years, though not released in January. What did get released in January, however, were both Paddington movies, and while everyone had high expectations for the sequel due to the first film’s success, the first film was poorly marketed, the trailers were not well-received and many saw that January release date as a death curse on the film. Thankfully, we were wrong.
Of course, Paddington is perfect proof why we shouldn’t judge a film by its trailer, January release date, or poor studio expectations. Despite its rocky path to release, there’s plenty of reasons why Serenity has the potential to be a pleasant January surprise: two Oscar-winning leads (Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway), two Oscar-nominated costars (Diane Lane and Djimon Hounsou), one of today’s most underrated character actors (Jason Clarke) and Oscar-nominated writer/director Steven Knight at the helm. What’s not to like about this film?
We can only hope for the best.
The Good: The camera is in focus.
The Bad: Okay, so what’s not to like about this film? Well, everything actually. Ladies and gentlemen, weren’t not even through the first month of the year, and we already have a strong contender for worst film of 2019. Not just one of the worst. THE worst. I can’t remember the last time this much Oscar-level talent in front of the camera and behind it banded together to squat out this much of a collective shit onto the screen. Serenity isn’t just bad. It’s monumentally bad. It’s atomic bomb desecration bad. It’s you can see everyone in the film at some point, about midway through, throw their hands up in the air, and not to wave ’em around like they just don’t care, but rather to say, “Fuck it. I give up with this dog shit.” bad.
Yeah, it’s that bad.
Steven Knight certainly has some clunkers on his screenwriting resume (Seventh Son, Burnt), but he’s also penned some mighty fine efforts like Dirty Pretty Things (for which he received a Best Original Screenplay nomination), Eastern Promises and Pawn Sacrifice. As a director, Locke (which he also wrote) was one of the best films of 2014. Serenity is a new low for him, one that makes that weird, stupid one he co-wrote where Jeff Bridges slurs and sloshes his lines like a homeless drunk and Julianne Moore turns into a dragon look like Citizen Kane. It fails on multiple levels – as a pulpy thriller, as a neo-noir mystery, as a twisty psychological mind-fuck, as a modern-day parallel to Moby Dick, and as resembling anything even close to being even remotely sound on a technical level.
But at least you’ll get to see Matthew McConaughey yell and holler a lot… at the sky… for no apparent reason. Have some fun and take a drink every time it happens. Be sure to get an AA sponsor afterward, though… You’ll need it.
From a technical standpoint, a good portion of the creative choices Knight makes come off as puzzlingly unnecessary attempts at flexing his artistic flair muscles. The most annoying example is the way he has the camera dive and swoop and swerve and cut around particular actors in a swift sudden fashion, as if he mistakenly thought it was 1999 and was on the set of The Matrix. There’s absolutely no narrative reason for these disorienting camera movements. They’re superfluously showy techniques added purely for Knight to beam a self-aggrandizing grin and go, “Look what I can do!”, like MADtv’s Stuart Larkin.
Here’s the major problem with this film, however… among many, many, many other lesser major problems this film has. As a neo-noir mystery, Serenity is fairly boring. Between the shocking lack of mood and atmosphere (two aspects you kinda need for a noir film), and a main setting so quaint it makes the quaintest, cutest town out of the Nicholas Sparks playbook look like a Mad Max wasteland, this film was heading straight for mediocrity, and no amount of music video stylized camerawork pizazz could alter that. But then, in what is I’m guessing an effort to spice things up, Knight wrenches in a twist so mind-bafflingly crazy, the utter bat-shit, bug-fuckery of it all will make your head spin faster than the Gravitron ride. Not only does this twist not answer any of the questions initially posed in the film, but it somehow manages to also open up about a thousand more questions, none of them good. In fact, some of the questions opened up from the reveal will leave you feeling so icky and disgusting, you’ll need to bathe in lye to scrub the filth off of you.
Worst, Knight shows his hand too early, about halfway through the film, and actually, if you’re paying attention at the beginning, from the very first shot. The early reveal sucks out all of the film’s intrigue (I’m using that word very loosely here), while also adding a level of unintended hilarity to the film’s pretentiously earnest, self-serious third-act that I’m fairly confident wasn’t intended.
Or maybe Knight did intend it all to go down this way? Maybe he was with us all along in being completely in on how incredibly dumb his initial premise is? I bet he congratulated himself with a hearty celebratory pat on his back over how cool and clever his big, ambitious, high-concept – emphasis on the “high” – reveal is before suddenly going – voila!! – and pulling the rug out from under us with a twist that ends up being a hundred times dumber than the stupidity he was already guilty of.
Well – boy! He sure got us good!
If you listen real closely, you can almost make out the sound of even M. Night Shyamalan letting a mocking chuckle slip from his mouth.
It’s not that I’m against crazy twists. That’s not the issue here; the issue is how haphazardly Knight adds the twist into Serenity’s story, putting no care or effort into giving it any sort of coherence to the central conflict. See, a good twist moves you to reevaluate everything you saw prior to it; it reveals new layers and nuances of the story that you initially didn’t catch, all in an effort to make the film a stronger, more rewarding experience. Jason Reitman’s Tully, one of the best films of last year, had an incredibly nutty twist, but when you went back and looked at everything before it through the new lens of the twist, it made sense to the story and gave the film more poignancy.
The only thing this fucking turd’s twist made me reevaluate was the $7 I spent on the ticket.
The Ugly: Kudos to Serenity for being the first film to usher in same-sex incestual underpinnings. The only thing more hot-and-heavy than the sexual tension between McConaughey and Hathaway is the apparent sexual tension between McConaughey and his onscreen son. I’m not exactly sure of the reason why Dill runs out butt naked and dives deep into the ocean to stare longingly at his son swimming toward him, but that scene actually is in this movie, and it stretches on for what feels like forever. Bang up job by the effects department for reducing his dong down to an androgynous nub.
Or maybe the water was cold that day? George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld can attest to the horrifying humiliation of shrinkage.
“Like a frightened turtle!”
Speaking of humiliation, there’s no shortage of humiliating performances here. McConaughey offers up a never-ending roundtable of smirks, chuckles, furrowed eyebrows and deep smoldering stares. Anne Hathaway, doing the worst impression of Jessica Rabbit that I’ve ever seen, says “daddy” in a soft-spoken, aroused tone so many times and does so each time so convincingly that she is shoo-in for winning Best New Starlet at the Adult Video News Awards. It’s hard to tell if Jason Clarke is acting like a babbling drunk in order to serve the character, or if he’s actually drunk to cope with the depressing reality that he did, in fact, say yes to starring in this film. Djimon Hounsou is really the only star here to come out of this almost unscathed, but even he can’t escape the arch, tropey characteristics of his role, who here serves as the conscience Dill clearly doesn’t have since he has no issues fucking every hole on the island and skinny dipping with his adolescent son.
He’s basically playing Morgan Freeman with a Beninese accent.
The worst offender here, though, is none other than Diane Lane, and good Lord, does she embarrass herself here. Trapped inside a shack for the entirety of the film, Lane’s sole purpose in this shit-show is to get boned by McConaughey, who has to fuck her ’cause how else is he gonna get gas money if he doesn’t? No exaggeration, that is literally all she gets to do – well, unless we’re also to include the rich, riveting dialogue she and McConaughey shoot back and forth at each other.
“You’re nothing more than a hooker.”, Constance says as she hands Dill a wad of cash as a way saying thank you for the hot pole-thumping she just received.
“Yeah… a hooker who can’t afford hooks.”, replies a downbeat Dill as he makes a mental note to make sure to hit a gas station on his way home, but not before giving Constance another good, hard ribcage rattling on his way out the door.
Oh, and of course, since this is Academy Award nominee Diane Lane and a veteran actress of the industry, she’s in no way obligated to perform a nude scene. That means we just have to pretend believe that she can wear a silk robe as she gets the hot and bothered horniness sledge-hammered right out of her, while the oppressively muggy island heat beats down on her like an abusive husband, and yet she still doesn’t produce even a single bead of sweat.
Consensus: Light years away from being as clever or entertaining as it prides itself in being, Serenity is an absurd, confounding and illogical mess, one that marks an appalling career low for both its immensely talent cast and writer/director Steven Knight.
Silver Screen Fanatic’s Verdict: I give Serenity an F (0 stars).
COMING NEXT WEEK…
1/28/19
- Box Office Recap, January 25-27
- What the Hell Were They Thinking?!
1/29/19
- Trailer Tuesday
- Benjamin’s Stash
2/1/19
- Arctic
- Miss Bala
2/2/19
- Velvet Buzzsaw
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