Movie Review: Suburbicon

Suburbicon ** / ***** 

Directed by: George Clooney.

Written by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov.

Starring: Matt Damon (Gardner), Julianne Moore (Margaret/Rose), Oscar Isaac (Bud Cooper), Noah Jupe (Nicky), Gary Basaraba (Uncle Mitch), Karimah Westbrook (Mrs. Mayers), Leith M. Burke (Mr. Mayers), Tony Espinosa (Andy Mayers), Alex Hassell (Louis), Glenn Fleshler (Sloan).

 

The Coen brothers originally wrote Suburbicon back in the 1980s – it was to be their follow-up to their debut film, Blood Simple (1984) – but then they put it in a drawer, made Raising Arizona instead, and never really looked back. Decades later, in comes frequent Coen collaborator George Clooney who decides he wants to make the film himself – and after he and his writing partner Grant Heslov come aboard, and graft on (apparently) an entire subplot about race, the result is this mishmash of a movie – a clash of tones that wants to make you wince one minute, and laugh the next. The Coens are masters at this of course – and yet, watching the film, I couldn’t help but think there was a reason they put this one in a drawer and didn’t make it. It would be tempting to blame the whole fiasco of this movie on Clooney and his contributions – that he came along and ruined a perfectly good Coen script. We’ll never know for sure what happened here – but I suspect the brothers knew that they wouldn’t be able to pull off this script – and they were right.

 

The film is set in the 1950s, in the pre-fab town of Suburbicon – a picture perfect town of white picket fences, green, green grass, and smiling happy white people in each and every single home. On the surface everything is perfect – that is until the Mayers move in, and commit the crime of being black. Almost everyone else in town is up in arms about the Mayers, ruining their postcard world – they’re not racist, you see, they just don’t want Suburbicon to go the way of Baltimore, and those darn negros, just don’t seem to want to work very hard do they? The fake scandal of the Mayers helps to cover up the real perversion happened literally in the Mayers backyard with their neighbors, the Lodges. Gardener Lodge (Matt Damon) and his family are awakened in the middle of the night by chatty home invaders, who end up chorolforming the whole family. Gardener, son Nicky (Noah Jupe) and Aunt Margaret (Julianne Moore) are all fine – but poor, wheelchair bound wife and mother Rose (also Moore – playing twins) doesn’t make it. This is just the tip of the iceberg with the problems with the Lodges – as poor little Nicky discovers just how far his father (and aunt) have gone.

 

The major problem with Suburbicon is that Clooney never really finds the right tone for the film. There are moments in the film when he’s clearly going for humor – sometimes it’s pitch black humor, sometimes almost absurdist – but it doesn’t really fit in with the surrounding material. Matt Damon is, I believe, a big part of the problem – he’s a fine actor, but completely wrong for this part. He seems to think he’s in a madcap Coen comedy – something like Raising Arizona – and yet, by the end of the film, he supposed to be downright chilling – sitting across the table from his young son, casually munching on a sandwich, while saying horrorifically cruel things to him. When the film started, I thought Gardener was like another father in Coen-land – William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo – but Gardener is far crueler than that. But it’s really not until the end where Damon shows anything approaching that level of cruelty – until then, he’s too busy mugging for the camera, and riding a comically small bicycle.

 

Some of the other cast members fare better – Julianne Moore is quite good, playing the postcard version of female, domestic bliss, while also showing you that mask sliding off of her. Oscar Issac is downright brilliant as a Insurance Claims investigator, who doesn’t buy the official story – it’s too bad his part is under 10 minutes total.

 

As for the racial storyline that Clooney apparently added into the movie, I understand the intentions behind it – the movie really could have been called White Privledge, as Gardener and company do horrible stuff, right out in public, and no one seems to mind – but the poor Mayers just try to exist and be black in an otherwise all white neighbourhood, and are demonized – and worse – for it. Yet I also cannot help but think that Clooney could have made the Mayers real people – here, they aren’t – they are a white person’s version of an ideal black family. The film doesn’t go any deeper than the most superficial roles Sidney Poitier had to play 50 years ago. It’s such a wasted opportunity.

 

I will say this for Suburbicon – it’s never boring. It’s over-the-top 1950s, style is just about right, Moore and Issac keep things lively, and there’s always something happening that grabs your attention. But the film never really works – it doesn’t really know what kind of film it wants to be, and so it tries to do way too much, and ends up pulling almost none of it off.