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Take an Oscar winner and Oscar nominee (and former Sexiest Man Alive) at the apex of their respective careers, who have a track record of starring in award-winning movies together and throw them into a period piece from an Oscar-winning director that’s based on a New York Times best-selling novel and you have … Serena, the almost universally panned new Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper film that premieres in very limited release today after already being available via video on demand for weeks (the modern equivalent of direct to video).
This is what we call a flop, kids.
The criticisms leveled at Serena are many. The plot is hackneyed, the script cliched. The narrative takes itself too seriously. The characters aren’t believable, compelling or sympathetic. Cooper’s Boston accent is terrible. The leads are miscast and lack their customary chemistry. The Czech Republic is barely passable as Appalachia. If this laundry list of faults doesn’t compel you to rush down to your local multiplex to catch Serena on the big screen ASAP (good luck finding a screen showing it), you aren't alone. That doesn’t mean, however, that this cinematic dud doesn’t come with some lessons that even those of us who aren’t Oscar winners can benefit from keeping in mind.
A poor context drags even star performers down
You would think the combined wattage of Lawrence and Cooper would be enough to buoy any film, but you’d be wrong. Not even their talents could save Serena from a shame-faced release strategy and a critical drubbing. If you don’t give people the tools with which to succeed, or you create an environment in which they face multiple barriers to achievement (in this case, a soapy, disjointed plot about a mercurial lumber baron and his Lady McBeth-like wife, odd cinematography choices and tentative direction) you can’t be surprised when the results are less than spectacular. Any star athlete who lobbied to be traded away from an underperforming franchise can attest to the same thing. Your track record doesn’t determine your future success
Lawrence has an Oscar to her name and stars in two of the decade’s hottest franchises (X-Men and The Hunger Games). Cooper has been nominated for an Academy Award for three straight years. And, yet, Serena is a roundly criticized mess. There are no sure bets and your past performance, no matter how stellar is not necessarily a good indication of what the future holds. Just ask companies like Pepsi (Crystal Pepsi) and McDonald’s (the Arch Deluxe). And, of course, things work the other way around, too. When Ben Affleck was stumbling around making Gigli and Daredevil, I’m sure few of us expected he’d rebound to direct best picture winner, Argo. And surely, when Colonel Harland Sanders, then a lawyer, engaged in a courtroom slugfest with his own client, his future as the founder of the world’s second largest restaurant chain wasn’t exactly how people anticipated his legacy.
What you did yesterday, what you do today and what you'll do tomorrow aren't always as connected as you assume.
Any vision is better than no vision
Serena’s post-production process took 18 months on top of the 18 it took to shoot the film. Despite being completed two years earlier, as of the end of Aug 2014, the movie didn’t even have a trailer. The full film was recut three times and screened for numerous distributors before Magnolia agreed to distribute it in the US. Susanne Bier is not an unproven director. She won an Academy Award for In a Better World. And yet, she seemed to buckle under the pressure of trying to deliver the last piece in a Lawrence/Cooper hat trick – critic Rex Reed not so charitably accuses her of “phoning it in from downtown Copenhagen.” I’ve written before about how trying to be all things to everyone and appeal to the broadest common denominator results in failure and Serena seems to be an object lesson in the pitfalls of this approach. It’s not a good movie according to critics, but neither is it egregiously bad enough to achieve cult status on par with something like The Room, nor does it proudly own and flaunt that badness like a Sharknado. It's just a banal underachiever. Having a clearly articulated point of view (whatever it may be) gives people something to respond to and either rail against or embrace – as any politician would tell you. No one rallies around tepidness or timidity and it’s not surprising that these qualities don’t drive box office returns, either. Learn more about my work and connect with me on Twitter.
