Review:
"Serenity"
Release Date: Jan. 25, 2019
Rating: R Running Time: 106 minutes Nice and sleazy does it for Steven Knight until nice and sleazy no longer does it for the writer/director of Serenity. Then Knight’s seemingly standard-issue erotic thriller transforms without little warning into something so far removed from those Body Heat and Basic Instinct knockoffs of the 1980s and the 1990s. Knight’s plot twist comes straight out of a certain writer/director’s playbook and it is one that audiences may have trouble accepting given it immediately changes the perception of everything that has come before Knight's out-of-nowhere reveal. For the first two acts, Serenity does as expected. Knight prompts Matthew McConaughey’s drunken sad-sack Baker Dill into a moral dilemma in a bid to save a loved one from a life of physical and emotional abuse. Dill lives a solitary life under an assumed name on the fictional Plymouth Island. When he’s not taking tourists fishing on his boat, Dill’s trying to catch a giant tuna he’s named Justice for reasons Knight reveals later. But Justice isn’t just the one that got away for Dill. Enter Dill’s ex-wife Karen, played with a forced femme fatale façade by Anne Hathaway. Before she can take off her designer sunglasses, Karen begs Dill to kill her current husband, Jason Clarke’s shady businessman Frank, because he beats her. If a $10 million payday isn’t incentive enough, Karen informs Dill that their teenage son Patrick has become an emotionally withdrawn wreck as a result of the abuse he witnesses and experiences. Knight has Dill undergo an internal debate about killing Frank, whom Clarke makes so vulgar, corrupt, and unlikable that it is hard to believe anyone would miss Frank were Dill to feed him to the sharks. Given everyone on Plymouth Island knows everyone’s business, Dill’s fellow islanders are positioned as a Greek Chorus by Knight. So Dill receives unsolicited advice advise from his lover (Diane Lane), his first mate (Djimon Hounsou), and even a mysterious island visitor (Jeremy Strong). Looking tired and haggard, McConaughey turns his already anguished Dill into a tortured mess. McConaughey carries himself as a man torn apart by conflict. He wants to do the right thing but it means doing wrong thing. While Hathaway never quite commits to playing the archetypical temptress as put forward by Knight, she does project enough fear and fragility to make a persuasive case for Dill to kill Frank. All is well and predictable until Knight turns Serenity into something so unexpected that it is hard to react to this jarring narrative shift. Knight makes the adjustment that much more difficult because he does it in a relatively subdued manner. There is a slight hint early in Serenity when Knight tips his hand about where he wants to take us, but it comes as part of an terse exchange, and an illuminating line of dialogue can only be taken at face value at the time it is uttered. What Knight tries to do is bold and imaginative with a subgenre that revels in its conventions. This is not to say Knight is completely successful. Knight does allows us to glimpse the precarious state of mind of a particular character who is pushed to the edge. But this also requires Knight to pull apart so many pieces of his story, therefore putting each of his characters in a different light, that he has trouble piecing everything back together in the new context he has created. Also, the idea he puts forth is outrageously audacious that accepting it is a struggle, especially given the way the rest of Serenity unfolds. Knight is betrayed by an obvious and conventional ending that fails short of his ambitions. “I am the rules,” is a mantra repeated throughout Serenity. Knight’s desire and willingness to break the rules is commendable even if his execution is less so. Robert Sims Aired: Jan. 24, 2019 Web site: https://www.serenityfilm.com/ |
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