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Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Rafael Sayegh, Diane Lane
Availability
Theaters everywhere on January 25
Nothing is ever as it seems in the film noir, a genre built on hidden motives and delayed revelations. Serenity, the absurd thriller on the tropical islands of screenwriter-director Steven Knight, takes this principle to an absurd new extreme. Describing the film as black, it is to be complicit in its deception. This is the kind of film easily spoiled, whose main reason for being is its sinuous architecture – and whose underlying vanity is, certainly, quite funny, or will be for those who feast, guilty or not. in stories that raise big, obvious questions about the nature of reality. But if Serenity has a high-flying concept, he does not use it very effectively. You can make the viewers themselves detectives, which allows us to solve a mystery slowly, or you can give up the charade earlier and just run with the premise you chose not to hide very carefully. It makes no sense to do neither.
This is an isolated island called Plymouth, a welcoming enclave where everyone knows each other, partly because there is only one bar and there is nothing to do except for fishing, drinking and kissing. Where exactly is this port? It's indeterminate. Matthew McConaughey is Baker Dill, a fishing boat captain who spends his days at the seashore with tourists and his first exasperated companion (Djimon Hounsou) and his often sleepless nights flipping bottles of rum or hitting boots with a rich local (Diane Lane). What makes Baker really move forward is a crusade worthy of Ernest Hemingway: his obsession with capturing an oversized and legendary tuna named Justice, which haunts the collective imagination of the island. Maybe it's just a way of not forgetting the time he spent fighting in Iraq or other aspects of his troubled and mysterious past.
This past does not stay long mysterious. In fact, it comes back immediately in Baker's life in the form of Karen Zariakas (Anne Hathaway), her ex-wife and high school friend. Karen left Baker, at a different time, for the rich Frank (Jason Clarke), who over time proved to be a sadistic and violent bully. Now, she came back, decades later, with a proposal: $ 10 million in cash to take her second husband to the sea and leave him there. His real currency of exchange is not money but Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), the son that she had with Baker a long time ago, that he always sees in his dreams and that he speaks in his most lonely moments. Patrick is now a pre-teen genius who escapes the whims of his father-in-law by hiding in his room and disappearing into his own deadly obsession with computer games.
This is the point where anyone, even a fairly familiar one, with stories of unlucky ones, interfering in stories of murder by desperate ladies will start asking questions. Does Karen say the whole truth or is she looking for a pigeon? (Hathaway, keeping her cards against the chest, offers a mix of cunning and vulnerability that any good femme fatale should possess.) Serenity has the superficial (and warm weather) form of a Body heatit is flagrant even to something else; From the jump, the film almost requires a deeper suspicion, like a killer who unveils evidence at random, while leaving a crime scene. What's going on with the milquetoast, a slightly offbeat salesman (Jeremy Strong) running around the edges of the story? And how is it that all the people Baker meets know more about what's going on in his life? Even the style of the film, characterized by remarkable camera pans, cutting crooked and stuttering, is cowardly, threatening to let the cats out of the bags.
As a screenwriter, Knight has touched the dark (see: his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dirty pretty things), as well as tricky identity puzzles, via the secret spy games of Eastern Promises and Ally. But Serenity may be closer in spirit to his over-valuation Locke; like this one-man-one-show, it is often played as a glorified exercise. Knight, to his credit, sometimes plays with the conventions of his kind of adoption: the shadows projected by the rotating ceiling fans, the slits of the narrow light penetrating through almost closed blinds, the hard beat of his dialogue. ("Waiting for some things at home to lose their meaning," says Baker, and Lincoln's spokesman who plays with him at least knows how to make his meal.) It's all meaningful. The cliché makes sense, given what is really happening. That's probably saying too much.
Many writers have the impression, at a given moment, to deconstruct the principles of narration. charitably Serenity could be called an attempt to search under the bonnet of the drama itself, to tinker allegorically with its moving parts. In practice, it is a hazel tree idea In search of a movie, Knight manipulates him badly, showing his hand too early and walking on the meaning of discovery by making sure that a secondary character literally drops his big bomb. Even with McConaughey sweating beautifully through the revelations, the film never exploits the true existential terror of its principle, the way … well, even establishing a relevant comparison would abandon Knight's game. At the end, Serenity just deepen your appreciation for other films – the "real" blacks it misleadingly refers to, and the mysterious puzzle that includes, at the very least, that a good gimmick is a terrible thing to lose.
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