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USA 2017
Directed by
George Clooney
105 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

Suburbicon

Synopsis: It’s 1959 and husband and father Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) is a happily married business executive living in suburban tranquility. Then a black family move in next door and everything goes pear-shaped.

Very much a family affair Suburbicon, penned by Clooney, his long-time producer-writer collaborator Grant Heslov and the Coen Brothers and starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac who have all appeared in Coen films, is rather like a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle when you’re used to doing 1000 piece ones. Despite being a neat enough little black comedy the familiar story and its familiar characters come together too easily to leave us with much more than a passably appealing outing.  Given the Coens’ credentials most people are going to be pointing the finger at the director but unless a lot of the script got left on the cutting room floor (apparently a character played by Josh Brolin was completely excised) it would seem to me that that is where the problem lies.  

Suburbicon opens promisingly as a tongue-in-cheek satire of post-war American Dream conformity with the opening credits featuring an animated brochure for the housing estate of the same name (a then-new phenomenon most famously embodied in Levittown, New York) but fairly quickly segues into James M. Cain grubbiness and, more problematically, clumsily marries its main story with an exposé of the virulent racism lurking beneath the Truman Show-like neighbourliness of this all-white slice of America. Which when you think about it this indeed sounds like a combination of the Coens’ retro-style, black comedy dispositions and Clooney’s more serious-minded inclinations. But though the potential is there it seems that the partners are not dancing to the same tune.

The Coens come out of it the best. With a strong suggestion of Fargo (1996) Damon and Moore are entertaining as the typical 1950s suburban couple who find their squeaky-clean idyll descending into sweaty, blood-stained chaos. The sub-plot about the black family who move in next door (this thread was based on the real family who first broke the colour barrier in Levittown) certainly could have worked with this trajectory but rather mysteriously it is dealt with almost entirely generically with Clooney for some reason keeping the two strands largely discrete (there a couple of scenes of fence-building that is intended to protect the whites from black “contamination” but where these fence were actually supposed to be in relation to the two homes I was unable to understand). The intention appears to have been to integrate the main narrative with a broader social commentary à la Pleasantville (1998) but if so it barely gets off the ground. 

Oscar Isaac has a fun role as an insurance claim investigator and the rest of the cast bring home the Coens’ typically quirky characters well but what really carries the film is Robert Elswit's marvellous cinematography and the retro production and costume design by James D. Bissell and Jenny Eagan respectively.

Yet despite its overall top-drawer production credentials and matching cast Suburbicon is minor league for all concerned except for Noah Jupe who impresses amongst such stellar company as Gardner’s young son, Nicky. He is, one feels, one kid who won't be growing up straight.

 

 

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