Serena (2014)
North Carolina mountains at the end of the 1920s – George and Serena Pemberton, love-struck newly-weds, begin to build a timber empire. Serena soon proves herself to be equal to any man: overseeing loggers, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving a man’s life in the wilderness. With power and influence now in their hands, the Pembertons refuse to let anyone stand in the way of their inflated love and ambitions. However, once Serena discovers George’s hidden past and faces an unchangeable fate of her own, the Pemberton’s passionate marriage begins to unravel leading toward a dramatic reckoning.
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Sorry, this movie sucks
Perfect cast and a good story
Don't listen to the negative reviews
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
I've never seen a more severely distorted movie adaptation from a novel than with Serena. The saga written by Ron Rash paints a picture of a Serena we never see on screen. She is independent, fierce, and unsympathetic from the first scene in the book. She is always in control; if by chance something takes her off guard, she strikes back quickly. There's a reason the novel is simply called Serena, not George Pemberton's Wife has a Breakdown. To read it is to be intrigued by a multifaceted, engaging woman.
The movie is a little short a quite different then the novel. They don't show how George and Serena fell in love. It also doesn't show the passion between them, except some sex scenes. The novel is better. They are a sort of Bonnie and Clyde because of the murders but they also bribe. It's like the director didn't have the time to make a good plot. Everything suddenly happens. If the movie would be 3 hours instead of 2, they could show how important authority was for Serena, the passion of their love (not just some sex scenes), the troubles with Rachel and her son, how Serena got mad and the killing of people who stand in their way. Really: read the novel! It has a better plot and a better ending. I also don't think 'Serena' was a good title for the movie. Even though Jennifer Lawrence had a lot of screen time, she was important to George and Galloway and that's it.
Serena was filmed when Silver Lining's Playbook was being aired, but didn't reached its audience until two years after. Set during the American depression, Serena (Lawrence), a feisty, headstrong woman, becomes the wife of bureaucratic timber- man, Pemberton (Cooper). They have dreams of living far away from their home town in North Carolina, but Pemberton's past threatens to destroy everything they're working for. Serena is rife with potential. The settings are beautiful, the costumes, hair and make-up are extraordinarily detailed. It's ruinous then, that its material isn't profound enough to interest us in the lead characters and their problems.
I have not read the book, and I see that most of the naysayers have. To me, knowing nothing about the book, this was a well-made film and the acting quite good, relative to some of the movies I've seen of late... I did find the "moral" a bit hard to swallow. Something like "barren women are doomed to misery". Seriously, Serena has a miscarriage and her life begins to unravel until finally she is driven crazy by the fact that her husband fathered another woman's child. The woman had been working at the timber company delivering meals with "extras" to the cabin where the owner of the company stayed before he met Serena, who stole his heart and became his wife. I enjoyed gaining some insight into how these timber camps worked in earlier times in North Carolina. The nature was beautiful and the corruption depicted and power struggles over land seemed pretty realistic. Definitely worth sitting through for the visuals alone. I might even watch this one again because of the excellent cinematography.