Serena movie review: logging for pulp

Um, so, yeah: How about them Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper? They are so amazing and gorgeous. And what chemistry! “I think we should be married” is the first thing he says to her in Serena, which is, to be fair, the first thing anyone would say to either of them. And so they are wedded. It’s early Great Depression North Carolina to which lumber magnate George Pemberton (Cooper: Guardians of the Galaxy) brings his new wife, Serena (Lawrence: X-Men: Days of Future Past), where his company is cutting down the last virgin forest in North America. (Bits of the Czech Republic stand in, beautifully, for the Blue Ridge Mountains.) For a while, this is solid melodrama — almost Golden Age of Hollywood stuff — as the “beautiful [but] wounded” Serena becomes an actual business partner with her husband, which is even cooler than it might be otherwise because he is totally into her brains and competence, not just her looks, and as everyone behaves in a wonderfully grownup way when it comes to the child George had previously fathered with a local woman, Rachel (Ana Ularu); whatever happened before they met is in the past, says Serena without rancor; and he’s paying to support the kid. (Though it does all pretty much suck for poor Rachel.) And there’s an intriguing subplot revolving around a push to build a national park right where George is logging, setting up an early clash between jobs and nature, between capitalism and environmentalism. But then it all goes completely batshit in so many ways, like in how pushing the plot forward requires a supremely stupid act by one of the main characters, an unsupported abdication of reason on the part of another, and a finale that is half trashy pulp, half accidental Monty Python. Thanks to Cooper and Lawrence — who remain a lot of fun to spend time with — Serena does at least maintain an entertaining level of batshit to the end.