Review: Steven Knight’s Serenity Doesn’t Thrive on Noir Traditions

The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.

Serenity
Photo: Aviron Pictures

Writer-director Steven Knight’s latest noir thriller, Serenity, commences in strange fashion, with tuna fisherman Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) taking some tourists out to sea, only to push the men aside when one hooks a huge tuna that he’s been desperately chasing for more than a year. When one of the tourists protests, Baker holds a knife to the man’s throat. The tuna ultimately gets away, leaving Baker without his prize or the day’s wages he’d hoped to earn off his now-furious guests. Baker is a simple man with simple tastes, but he still needs money for boat fuel, and his single-minded devotion to landing his monster tuna threatens to leave him stranded on shore.

Just as Baker’s financial situation hits a critical low, he walks into the local watering hole and runs into Karen (Anne Hathaway), his ex-wife. Hathaway signals her character’s role as a femme fatale with all the subtlety of a foghorn. Karen is one of those film characters who can’t speak to someone unless facing away from them and looking back over her shoulder, and she talks out of the corner of her mouth in an unwaveringly sultry drawl. In a town filled with working-class folk with old clothes and mist-flattened hair, Karen’s designer dress and perfect coif mark her as a disruption to the norm, and Baker greets her with immediate agitation, wondering when she’ll leave town. Naturally, Karen has ventured to this backwater seeking a favor: Claiming that she’s being abused by her new husband, Frank (Jason Clarke), and she wants to set up a weekend fishing trip on Baker’s boat with the express purpose of killing him.

Karen’s arrival gives structure to an initially loose-limbed film, yoking Baker’s Ahab-like pursuit of the monster tuna to a spin on Double Indemnity. But it’s in the entrance of Frank that the film briefly develops into something more than a stale retread of noir trademarks. Nominally, Frank fits within a genre tradition of unnerving husbands, but any ambiguity as to his treatment of Karen is immediately obliterated almost as soon as he kicks the door open to Karen’s hotel bathroom and beats her as a matter of dispassionate routine. Clarke is all jagged smirks and narrowed eyes as Frank. Where McConaughey and Hathaway come across as acting out well-worn archetypes, Clarke transforms Frank into pure nightmare fuel—a figure who wouldn’t be out of place in the margins of a David Lynch film. Frank is such a disruptive presence that he briefly elevates the film into something promisingly deranged.

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Soon, however, Serenity sinks back into the quotidian. Interiors are plunged in shadow, often lit by dim lanterns or the distant glow of a lighthouse beacon. Likewise, the film’s dialogue attempts to add a hard-boiled spin to small-town coastal life. At one point, Baker’s local sugar momma, Constance (Diane Lane), playfully calls him a hooker when she gives him cash for his fishing supplies, to which he cynically responds, “A hooker with no hooks.”

Gradually, Knight telegraphs a bizarre undertone to this small town, mostly suggested by the sight of a suited salesman, Reid Miller (Jeremy Strong), who constantly chases after Baker with the hope of speaking to him. When the two finally converse, Reid triggers what will go down as one of the most baffling, illogical twists in the history of cinema, an upheaval so massive that it suddenly reorients Knight’s lazy neo-noir tics as a postmodern exercise. But therein lies the problem: The narrative switcheroo that Knight employs doesn’t deepen the narrative or its characters. Instead, the twist exists only to retroactively justify the director’s feeble stylistic choices, recasting them as deliberately thin riffs on well-worn genre material.

Score: 
 Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong  Director: Steven Knight  Screenwriter: Steven Knight  Distributor: Aviron Pictures  Running Time: 106 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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