Something is rotten in Suburbicon
George Clooney’s new satire is a brightly colored blend of noir and political satire that never fully develops into anything worthwhile.
Hollywood finds something appealing about returning to the world of the 1950s as a means of showing our society’s flaws. Some of the best satire — works like The Truman Show and Pleasantville — return to that presumed “simpler time” to showcase the world as it was, and how it still remains. Director George Clooney, whose previous directorial efforts often return to a bygone era, hopes to evoke a similar side-eye for nostalgia with his latest, Suburbicon. But Suburbicon’s condemnation of the past feels all too real in a world where its images grace our television screens nightly. Couple that with two very different stories that have no business being mashed together and, in spite of a fantastic cast, Suburbicon never truly invites you in.
Suburbicon started out as a script written in the late ’90s by the Coen brothers. The setting was modern-day but the plotline was the same as in the finished product: a man’s wife is murdered and the belief is that he bumped her off to be with her sister. The fly in the ointment? The man’s young son who comes to realize his father organized the whole thing. Clooney, who’d worked with the Coens previously, took a shine to the script and bought it. The caveat? He had been working on a 1950s-set story with writing collaborator Grant Heslov about the first African-American family to move into a suburban community.
How does one reconcile those two stories? If you’re Clooney, you mash both plotlines together with all the finesse of a small child jamming Play-Doh into a door lock. The Hitchcockian murder mystery is what’s being hyped in the trailers, and audiences will be disappointed to realize that’s not the film’s central focus, though it is what 95% of the movie is about.
Drawing from the likes of Double Indemnity and Vertigo, Clooney creates a glossy send-up of the 1950s murder mystery that works purely because of the Coens’ influence. The Lodges are briefly introduced: mild-mannered father Gardner, his wheelchair-bound wife and her sister Maggie (both played by Julianne Moore), and precocious son, Nicky (Noah Jupe). The bitter wife is quickly bumped off by two men who definitely would look at home as 1950s thugs, leaving Gardner and Maggie to raise Nicky. Anyone who’s watched a mystery like this knows right away that Gardner and Maggie are in on it, and so the movie plays as more of a parody than anything else.
Matt Damon is perfectly fine in the main role, though it’s easy to see where George Clooney’s Cary Grant-esque persona would have worked better. (Clooney was initially planning to star.) Damon doesn’t have the movie-star tone the character requires, but he’s just normal enough to make the character believable as a man everyone would assume didn’t kill his wife. Much of the humor derives from his blasé reaction to everyone’s sorrow over his loss. Characters continually pop up to say “I’m sorry,” as he blows them off. His increased anxiety over everything manifests in his constant squeezing of various stress toys. The increasing cruelty to his son subtly builds the more Nicky learns, but it’s never believable that this is a man who would outright murder his own child.
Julianne Moore fares somewhat better as Gardener’s tired wife and bubbly sister-in-law. Moore borrows from the likes of Jean Arthur in her performance, and much of what doesn’t work with Damon’s performance works in hers. Her attempts to control Nicky start out by being his friend before manipulating him with declarations that no one will believe his story. Her simple-mindedness is a bit demeaning — she takes great joy in knowing Aruba is a “protectorate” — but Moore’s smile and ebullient personality aid in making you enjoy watching the character. She’s also the one exuding the most chemistry opposite Damon. There’s a scene in this film involving a Ping-Pong paddle that is pure hilarity and probably the sauciest stab at the decade in the entire film.
Also making something out of a throwaway role is Oscar Isaac as insurance investigator Bud Cooper. The character puts a bow on the film’s moral — bringing up the reliance on coincidence — but overall acts as a fun, snarky outsider to everything that’s happening. Isaac hasn’t had the chance to show a comedic flair outside of the deadpan, and here he demonstrates an excellent comedic timing that makes you wish he was in the film more. He does make an impression in a very brief few minutes.
The scene stealer is young Jupe as Nicky. Being adorable only gets you so far and Jupe has to convey terror, frustration, anger and confusion, often with zero dialogue. He hearkens back to Teresa Wright in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, knowing that the adults in his life aren’t to be trusted, but feeling completely unable to do anything. He’s crafty, calling his uncle (played with heart and a dash of booze by Gary Basaraba) the minute things go down and creating a barricade to prevent anyone from entering his room. His interactions with the little boy next door are sweet, but like everything in the neighbors’ storyline, they’re ultimately just trite and uninteresting.
The issue lies in the film remembering that it wants to tell two stories that have no business occupying the same space. The film opens with a scrapbook advertisement for the town of Suburbicon, a planned community where “the only thing missing…is you….” and anyone of color. The film seeks to send up the concept of how “great” the 1950s were with the introduction of the Meyerses, the first black family in Suburbicon. Cut to an hour and 44 minutes of nothing but white men and women pounding on drums, building fences, and, in one scene that feels pointedly inserted to connect to current topics, a man hanging a Confederate flag on the Meyers’ window. This would be political satire if it weren’t something we were seeing daily on the news and Internet. If the goal is to remind audiences how far we haven’t come, newsflash, we’re well aware.
The worst thing is that the family isn’t given any personality by Clooney and Heslov’s script. The film draws focus away from the murder plot to show us the Meyers family watching television, hanging out around the house, and being discriminated against with little message other than “isn’t this terrible?” There’s no need for commentary when change or catharsis are still waiting to happen. The Meyerses lack any names or character traits. If the goal is to not make them token people of color, the script fails horribly. In the end we’re left with two stories fighting for supremacy and the white people triumphing yet again. Seems to fly in the face of Clooney’s message.
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Had Suburbicon stayed in the Coen brothers’ hands, it might have been a solid, if unmemorable, entry in their oeuvre. With Clooney it’s a blunt examination into our current and past political structure that says nothing but the most surface-level statements about racism being bad. The cast is wasted, if fun in fleeting glimpses. This goes into the “what could have been” pile of wasted opportunities.