SERENITY (2019): Serenity Now, Insanity Also Now

Serenity is that rare movie that is terrible in so many ways that it's a miracle it exists. On the level of  writing, directing, acting, editing, photography, music, and probably catering, it fails spectacularly. Lots of movies are terrible, but most tend to stem from cynicism and profitability, the need to please too many people at once. Serenity surely accurately represents the vision of its director. No one meddled, no one took it out his hands in the editing room, no one supplanted his message with an audience-friendly approach. This is the gargantuan misfire of one artist, faithfully portrayed on the screen. It derails in the first act and keeps on chugging.

Its $25 million budget is slim considering its production value and cast. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway must have taken significant pay cuts to work on this film. It's not hard to understand why. The writer and director is Steven Knight, who wrote my favorite film of the 2000s (Dirty Pretty Things) as well as another damn good thriller of the same era (Eastern Promises). He also directed an excellent chamber piece a few years ago called Locke, which took place entirely within the confines of Tom Hardy's car as he drove from Birmingham to London. That movie, no action and all dialogue, was captivating all the way through.

So it's not hard to see why Serenity's two lead actors and six (6) production companies took a risk on Knight. It didn't pay off. But boy, did it ever not pay off.

I'd say that someone along the line should have said no to Knight, but I honestly can't imagine any point at which this film was on track. Most bad movies have a good movie hidden within them somewhere. This one is like a Russian doll of badness; each layer of the plot reveals a new level of preposterousness.

Trailers set the film up as a modern sweaty noir picture. The setting, a fictional Florida Key-like island called Plymouth, recalls Key Largo. The grizzled McConaughey recalls Bogart, or at least tries to, as fisherman-for-hire Baker Dill. (Because every single element of this film has some sort of allegorical significance, I'm sure this name means something, but I can't figure out what.) He makes a living taking rich people out to catch big fish, but has fallen on hard times. There's a big tuna--he calls it Justice--that he's been angling for since he's been there, but he's never caught it: a character point that seems right out of Robert McKee's playbook for How to Give a Main Character Purpose. A literal Big Fish that he's literally trying to catch.

Then his estranged ex-wife Karen (Hathaway) shows up unexpectedly with a proposal. She's married to Frank (Jason Clarke), who's abusive to her and her son Patrick. Patrick, of course, is Dill's son. She's proposing that Dill take Frank out on a fishing expedition and that Frank not come back.

It sounds like your average noir plot, a la Double Indemnity and Body Heat: Femme Fatale comes to the Morally Compromised Hero with a murder plot, Hero is reluctant to accept but does it anyway because of his feelings for/sexual attraction to the Femme Fatale, things spin out of control. Rest assured that Knight has far less up his sleeve than that. There is a genre-bending surprise twist at the midpoint which I won't reveal, but somehow it's less surprising and less thrilling than if the movie had just continued as a regular old noir.

But then again, as a noir it would have been merely awful and not baffling. McConaughey hurls himself into the role with a ferocity that seems to combine his Lincoln commercials at their most arcane with a kind of Nicolas Cage-esque expressiveness. His performance is not good, because nothing in this movie is good, but it's appropriate to the movie's general messiness. Clarke does all that Knight asks him to do, which is to grunt and threaten and snarl, but he's not so much a villainous menace as he is merely despicable. Djimon Hounsou is blameless as Dill's first mate.

Hathaway, who's proven herself a great actor, has no idea what to do with Karen, which is all Knight's fault and not hers. She's introduced as a mysterious possible threat to Dill's relative comfort, but Knight doesn't follow through. That there are no surprises or revelations around her character is probably the movie's biggest failure. It generally has no room for women; the only other female role is a flirty neighbor played by Diane Lane, who can occasionally be seen peering out of windows knowingly, as if there is something else to know.

The ending is confounding, but no more confounding than the movie that led up to it. Knight will not let us rest until we know for sure that this movie is an Allegory with a capital A. Without revealing what happens, let me assure you that Knight finds a way to involve video games, The Troops,  one of those news broadcasts where an unseen reporter narrates the ending for us, and a fishing pole on Dill's boat that attaches to the waist of its user in a way that makes the murder weapon in A Clockwork Orange look subtle. There's also a nerdy accountant-looking character (Jeremy Strong) who keeps chasing after Dill and Must Mean Something. And if we ever doubt that this is a Big Meaningful Movie and that he is a Literate Filmmaker who has Read Many Books, Knight packs it with constant allusions to any author who's ever written anything nautical-related. I spotted Shakespeare, Melville, and Hemingway. Coleridge too, I think, and not just that the movie looks like Knight wrote it while in an opium daze.

How many stars do I give this movie? It's one of the most critically misguided movies I've ever seen, but it's not boring. Nor is it a cynical crowd-pleaser, like your average Transformers movie, or Pottersville. When the ambitious project of one artist goes bananas like this movie does, it's usually worth a look. I don't know if Serenity clocks in with the greatest disasters of film history, like Cleopatra or Heaven's Gate or The Exorcist II, but it's not for lack of trying. Only a filmmaker with proven talent like Knight would have been allowed to make a movie this horrendous. I'm refusing to give it a star rating because it does not exist on a scale of good to bad. It is itself, wonderfully, awfully, itself.