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.

Movie Review: The Monuments Men

The Monuments Men
Directed by: George Clooney.
Written by: George Clooney & Grant Heslov based on the book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter.
Starring: George Clooney (Frank Stokes), Matt Damon (James Granger), Bill Murray (Richard Campbell), Cate Blanchett (Claire Simone), John Goodman (Walter Garfield), Jean Dujardin (Jean Claude Clermont), Hugh Bonneville (Donald Jeffries), Bob Balaban (Preston Savitz), Dimitri Leonidas (Sam Epstein), Justus von Dohnányi (Viktor Stahl), Holger Handtke (Colonel Wegner).

After his first two films as a director, George Clooney looked like he could become another major actor-director – not unlike someone like Warren Beatty. Yet his last three films have all been somewhat lesser efforts – a little too safe, too unwilling to take much in the way of risks. His debut film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, may well be his best – the one where Clooney looked to be pushing himself, and although he apparently did not get along with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman – the result was a fascinating, funny exploration of a man who lied to make his life more interesting – and was also visually excellent. His follow-up – Good Night and Good Luck – looked great in black and white, and was a wonderful film about Edward R. Murrow’s fight with Joseph McCarthy – but already the signs were there that Clooney was more comfortable with straight ahead, safe dramas. With Leatherheads, he tried to make a screwball comedy – and it didn’t really work. The Ides of March was better than many gave it credit for – but it still felt like what it was – a filmed play with some great performances, and not much else. Now comes The Monuments Men – a WWII “men on a mission” movie which is the dullest film Clooney has made yet as a director. The film is agreeable for the most part – but not the least bit challenging, and it feel significantly longer than its two hour runtime. He’s got a great cast, but doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. He’s got a fascinating plot, but takes the safest route imaginable with it. In short, while The Monuments Men is hardly a bad movie, it’s something perhaps worse – completely forgettable.

Clooney stars in the film as Frank Stokes – an art professor who in the waning days of WWII wants to ensure that the culture of Europe – all the art, the buildings, etc – are protected and preserved. Hitler has been stealing art from everywhere the Nazis have gone – all in the hopes of starting his own, massive museum. He has also left orders that if Germany falls, all of it is to be destroyed. Stokes gets permission to assemble a team of men to try and prevent this from happening. It’s difficult, because the army doesn’t much care about it – which is understandable. They want to win the war, and lose as few men as possible. So Stokes is stuck assembling a team of men who otherwise would not be fighting at all – James Granger (Matt Damon), who has a weak heart. Richard Campbell (Bill Murray) and Preston Savita (Bob Balaban) who would normally be too old. The same goes for Walter Garfield (John Goodman) – although his weight probably doesn’t help either. Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville) is a Brit the get as their point man – and is a hopeless drunk. Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin) is a Frenchman with bad eyes. Eventually, they’ll enlist Sam Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas) – a German Jew who fled to American 1938 – to be their driver. And Granger makes friends with Claire Simone (Cate Blanchatt) a French “collaborator”, who documented every piece of art that flowed through the museum she worked at in the hopes that eventually it could be tracked down and returned. This is what the Monuments Men want as well.

For a movie about war, The Monuments Men is mainly kind of dull – this is understandable in a way, because these men don’t see much actual fighting. They mainly come in behind the frontlines and try and identify, recover and ship out the art they find. It’s all kind of a puzzle, because the art doesn’t seem to be where they think it should be. For a movie about art however, The Monuments Men doesn’t seem to know too much about it. Stokes gives a good, impassioned speech about “preserving the foundation of Western culture” and the danger of destroying a people’s achievement as a way of exterminating the people themselves – but other than a few moments of awe when discussing a few pieces of art, the movie doesn’t seem very interested in that either. Worse still, Clooney has assembled a talented cast – but not given them much to do. You would think that teaming up Murray and Balaban – who share most of their scenes together – would be a surefire way to guarantee entertainment, but it really doesn’t work. Neither does teaming up Goodman and Dujardin – meaning when tragedy strikes the pair, it doesn’t have much of an impact. The best pairing is undeniably Damon and Blanchatt – who have a real chemistry together. Whenever they are on screen, the movie comes alive. Whenever they’re not, you wish they were.

The movie progresses pretty much precisely the way we expect it to – and ends happily enough (although the final scene in the movie is almost laughably sincere). As a director, Clooney doesn’t show all that much imagination – but he’s competent behind the camera. In front of it, he still has the same Clooney charm – although it’s a little subdued this time, as he is given most of the movie’s “big important” moments and speeches.

The Monuments Men is far from a horrible movie – but it is a movie that plays it far too safe to be truly good either. There doesn’t seem to be much at stake in the movie – and this is a film that needs that sense of danger and weight behind it. Instead, everything about the film feels inconsequential. We knew there were problems when it moved out the Oscar season at the last minute, so this shouldn’t be too surprising. But it’s still disappointing. If Clooney wants to be Warren Beatty, he’s got a long way to go.

Movie Review: The Ides of March

The Ides of March *** ½

Directed by: George Clooney.

Written by: George Clooney & Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon based on the play by Willimon.

Starring: Ryan Gosling (Stephen Myers), George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara), Paul Giamatti (Tom Duffy), Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns), Marisa Tomei (Ida Horowicz), Jeffrey Wright (Senator Thompson), Max Minghella (Ben Harpen), Jennifer Ehle (Cindy Morris), Gregory Itzin (Jack Stearns), Michael Mantell (Senator Pullman).

In many ways, The Ides of March is a throwback to the films of the 1970s – and perhaps even further back. While watching it, I thought of Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate from 1972 and even Robert Rossen’s All the Kings Men from 1949. This works both for and against The Ides of March. For, because movies like this don’t get made much anymore, and it’s good to see an intelligent political thriller, with one of the best ensemble casts of the year at the top of their game. And against, because there really isn’t anything new here. It’s not exactly an original sentiment to say that politics and power corrupts – and if you want to win, you have to be as corrupt as the next guy, which is essentially what the movie is saying. There are no good guys – just different levels of rotten. Yet George Clooney, as director, co-writer and star as an instinctual feel for this material that for the most part overcomes those weaknesses. Yes, there are scenes and dialogue that are a little too on the nose – and some character motivations I didn’t really buy, but I didn’t much care. I liked every second of the movie.

The movie opens with Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) walking through the stage where his candidate, Governor Mike Morris (Clooney) is going to debate his opposition later that night – even going as far as to deliver part of the Governor’s speech. It’s a story familiar with anyone who watches CNN – Morris is a Democratic candidate for President, who should be able to win the General Election easily – but first he has to be nominated, and Senator Pullman, is putting up a big fight. Both sides need to win Ohio for their delegates that could put either over the top. And things are getting dicey. Myers is second in command of the campaign, behind Paul Zara (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) a more seasoned veteran, who knows their candidate is in tough. Ohio is an open primary – meaning anyone, not just registered Democrats can vote, and the Republicans are urging their supporters to vote Pullman, who they think they can beat come November. They may be able to win without Ohio, but that would require them to make a deal with Senator Thompson (Jeffrey Wright), a former candidate, who drops out, but has hundreds of delegates who will do whatever he says. But Morris hates Thompson and said he would never make any backroom deals for support – and Thompson wants something big for his support.

Myers is a true believer in Morris. He truly believes that Morris is the real deal, not just another cynical politician, but someone who is running for the good of the country and someone who can change things. But things start to get complicated – first Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), who is running Pullman’s campaign calls him for a meeting while Paul is away. Stephen knows he should not – it wouldn’t look good to be seen with Duffy – but he cannot resist. Then there is the pretty young intern, Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), who comes onto him – but has some secrets she keeps from Stephen. By the time Stephen realizes the mistakes he has made, he is in way too deep.

The Ides of March is really Gosling’s movie, and he carries it with ease. In last month’s brilliant Drive, Gosling barely spoke, but in The Ides of March, he hardly ever shuts up. The movie is based on a play, so it is largely dialogue driven, and Gosling never misses a beat. The film is about his journey – his slow corruption, going from an idealist into a cynical hack, and Gosling does a great job with it. Clooney, in what is a supporting role, is also brilliant as Morris. He looks every inch a politician, and sounds like one too. He is no idealist, like Stephen, and knows what he needs to do to win, and he’s willing to go there. Stephen just doesn’t know how far Morris has already gone. Evan Rachel Wood has the other key role, and she’s good as the wide eyed intern, both more and less innocent than we first expect her to be. The rest of the cast comes and goes, but all of them get some fine moments – Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tirade about loyalty, Paul Giamatti revealing just how cynical he is, Marisa Tomei proving why you can never trust reporters and Jeffrey Wright, who doesn’t care who is President, as long as he gets something out of it. You hire this supporting cast, and you damn well better give them something to do – and Clooney does not disappoint.

George Clooney has become one of the most consistent actors working. His movies are not always great, but they are always at least interesting and intelligent. As a filmmaker, he has shown growth in just four movies – his best remains Good Night and Good Luck, and The Ides of March is a nice recovery from Leatherheads, which was largely a failure. He makes movies that are largely dialogue driven, but even here, adapting a play, his films do not feel like photographed plays – but actual films, with a distinctive visual look. The Ides of March is not quite the directorial triumph Good Night and Good Luck was (mind you, I’m a sucker for black and white), but Clooney once again acquits himself nicely behind the camera. The film does have the visual look and feel of a movie from the 1970s.

Overall, I quite enjoyed The Ides of March, even while admitting it has flaws. It was good to see a movie that takes modern politics seriously – and it was refreshing to see that George Clooney, who has been accused of being one of those “Hollywood Liberals” time and again, make a movie where the Democrats took center stage – and proved to be rotten as well. The Republicans aren’t even present in this movie. The Democrats did all of this to themselves. The message is clear – politics stinks, no matter what side of the aisle you are on.