by Jason Adams
Although I don't think it's ever spoken in the film it's hard not to have the "Serenity Prayer" -- God grant me the serenity, wisdom, change, courage, check and etc -- echoing in your cavernous, more cavernous by the second, head while watching Serenity, writer-director Steven Knight's nervous-breakdown-put-to-film. Starring Matthew McConaughey as the hard-drinking and hard-sexing good ol' boy in paradise called Baker Dill (and really we all knew it was only a matter of time before Matthew McConaughey played a character called "Baker Dill" right?) watching Serenity is, well, an experience that calls for prayer. Any prayer. An exorcism, even.
I realize at this point, with these balls-deep references to demon possessions and nervous breakdowns, you're probably thinking that Serenity sounds like a miserable experience. It's not...
It's just you've kind of got to go a little over the top with Serenity if you want to make it anywhere near the rarefied air this sucker heaves. You know those parts in Super Mario Brothers (the original NES version obviously; I am old) where Mario would shoot up into the clouds for some extracurricular coin collecting? And there'd be those snapping plants and you'd be like, "How the hell do those plants live up here?" And then a wall of fireballs would be spinning around you and suddenly you were wearing a raccoon skin on your little cartoon body and playing the flute and it's like, "What? Huh? What?" Yeah. That.
To write about what Serenity is about is a challenge. I am challenged. To plot its points might rob the thrill of discovery from you, but I'll give you a general gist-shape. Baker Dill (BAKER DILL!) lives on an island where he's always hunting for a great big fish. He takes tourists out for spins to buy the bait and the bourbon, but he's single-minded on that darn fish. Even when he's sexing the local single lady (Diane Lane, wasted, but who isn't really) he's talking about that fish.
Then a mysterious woman - you know she's mysterious because she wears very large hats - rolls into town, and she's played by Anne Hathaway, expert hat wearer. Seems somebody's got a sleazeball husband (Jason Clarke, sleazeballing) in need of killing. It's a Noir set-up played to Maximum Noir -- full-throated bourbon banter back and forth and back and forth, while finding shadows in a sunny place in which to pose alluringly, with sweat.
And then strand by strand, wedge by wedge, chunk by ever-heaving heavenly chunk, Serenity collapses in on itself like an imploding star, and the light, the light, my friends, it is blinding. It's not up to me to steal from you that sensation, so all I will say is even after watching it I have no idea what anyone's intentions were with Serenity -- how seriously it's intended, if it is pre-planned camp, or if I was maybe gassed while I was waiting for the movie to start and it was all an hallucination]. I don't know. You don't know. I don't think we will ever know anything ever again. The world after Baker Dill is a strange place. Come. Become one of us. It doesn't hurt anymore, I promise...