Review: Serenity (2019) Dir. Steven Knight
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How would it look if Christopher Nolan tried to adapt ‘Moby Dick’ by way of Double Indemnity (1944) while recovering from a traumatic brain injury? A lot like Steven Knight’s Serenity (2019) — and yes — that means it’s every bit as entertaining as it sounds.
The film opens up with an extreme close up of a young boy’s face. A deep zoom into his left eye reveals a sweeping ocean, dotted by a lone trawler. Guess its name.
Aboard, Matthew McConaughey stars as himself as Baker Dill(?), a weary deep-sea fisherman who just barely scrapes by taking entitled tourists out to get rum-drunk with a rod in hand. But, like all salty dogs worth literary description, Dill is obsessively driven by his need to catch one big tuna in particular, which he calls “Justice”. This shows Steven Knight understands symbolism, and is to be applauded.
Everyone on the tiny, isolated island of Plymouth is aware of Dill’s quest. Especially in the know is an autistic man-in-black who is always just a few seconds late to get Dill’s attention. He says, “I am always just a few seconds late.”
Other simple Dill hobbies include writing down in a notebook that he didn’t catch the fish while a grisly old bartender encourages him that one day he will catch the fish, and returning a wandering cat to nameless seaside maiden Diane Lane in exchange for sex and money. At some point he mentions being a veteran of the Iraq war and having an estranged son.
After one inexplicable Lane’s stray paid lay, Dill goes out to “shower”, which here means to cliffside dive in the nude. As he cheeks his way on over to the land’s end, the camera performs a series of audible whip-pans around Dill and his big, good ass. It looks distinctly like a video game. He dives in and — after a brief tribute to Nevermind — sees bubbles in the water coalesce to form the image of a young boy who looks a lot like the one whose face the movie is taking place in. This is his son, with whom he can communicate telepathically, of course.
Later, Dill’s simple Ahabian impetus is interrupted by the appearance of an old flame, and the mother of Little Dill. Karen, played like a battered Jessica Rabbit by Anne Hathaway, has traveled to Plymouth with her abusive billionaire husband — who Jason Clarke portrays with Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans-levels of restraint — in order to offer Dill $10,000,000 to kill him during a fishing excursion. Dill scoffs at the idea and takes off looking for Justice, even as Karen explains from the dock that she just wants to escape his rich tyranny for their child’s sake. The autistic man in black is, again, just a few seconds too late.
The next day, the evil husband boards the Serenity after paying Dill $10,000. There, he asks Dill where he could buy a child prostitute on the island (he is the bad guy) before blowing off steam about how lame his step-son is. Dill begins to listen intently as the man describes how his boy does nothing all day but play a game he made for himself on the computer, in which he plays as a man on an island trying to catch a big fish. The boy tells his step-father that if he weren’t distracting himself in-game all day, he would have worked up the gall already to instead commit step-patricide.
So yes, the whole film takes place inside the video game that the idiot savant boy has designed to watch his virtual father have transactional sex with Diane Lane. It seems Karen’s indecent proposal is a patch from the god/boy, who wants to watch his e-dad kill his step-dad so that he can in turn work up the courage to do so himself. Also, in the real world Dill died in Iraq. This twist is so on the nose that even Dill figures it out.
His self-serious turn towards dark enlightenment makes the rest of the film even more bizarre. It turns out Dill’s autistic pursuer is a literal manifestation of the rules. Upon finally catching up to Dill, he says, “Who the fuck I am is I am the rules.” His purpose is to try to convince Dill to catch the fish — not kill the step-father — because that’s the rules.
Of course, the whole virtual population of Plymouth is programmed around a set of rules that relies on Dill’s trying to catch the fish. When he learns of his non-reality and decides to break the matrix, he begins to guzzle rum from the unlabeled bottle, before staggering around town dispatching existential questions in order to short-circuit local NPCs. McConaughey’s snarling, self-righteous performance as the only man in the world with a purpose reads even more like a red-pilled forum poster’s wet dream than did his role as the insufferably Straussian True Detective Rust Cohle.
The film’s last 45 minutes might as well have Steven Knight come out onto the screen so he can take a bow, unaware he is without pants. His directorial confidence is baffling considering every post-production interview has seen him admit that he began writing the film just because he liked to fish, and then basically decided to just pull the rug out from under things when he ran out of steam.
In a defensive Instagram post, Anne Hathaway backed up Serenity’s “complexity”, saying that “it asks a lot of the audience. It exists outside cut-and-dry, black-and-white moralizing, beyond the realm of ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down,’ ‘it sucked,’ ‘it was bad- ass,’ etc. It will need some analysis and conversation after.” She’s right. Analysis reveals a film so dazzlingly stupid that its self-assuredness is practically dissociative, if not wildly entertaining.
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