Not even a nice place to visit.
I was so excited when the trailer to Suburbicon first dropped last summer. A dark comedy/thriller directed by George Clooney from a long-lost Coen brothers script which he polished up was a scenario that would cause most any film geek would salivate. Watching the truly awesome trailer for Suburbicon gives off such a dynamic feeling of dark comedy and fun action in a quiet suburban setting and does a great job in selling a different kind of film than most audiences expect. What Suburbicon ends up being is different for sure, but it’s a different rooted in a kind of malevolence and mean-spiritedness that would make even the most ardent Coen fan squirm.
In Suburbicon, a mild-mannered 1950s business and family man named Gardner (Matt Damon) wakes his young son Nicky (Noah Jupe) up in the middle of the night when a pair of violent thugs (Alex Hassell and Glenn Fleshler) burst into the house, holding them, Gardner’s wife Rose, and her twin sister Margaret (both played by Julianne Moore) captive. After the thugs kill Rose and state that the rest of the family is next if Gardner doesn’t pay them the money he owes, everyone is scared. Yet as Nicky begins to explore things further, he realizes there’s more to the events than everyone knows.
There are some movies you don’t want to give up on, some which have so much going for them that you try and justify every little detail that just doesn’t work. Few movies proved better examples of this last year than Suburbicon. The film has made the cardinal sin of passing itself off as a certain type of experience before telling audiences, “Alright, now that I’ve trapped you, here’s what I’m really going to do to you.” There’s a very carefully marked line in cinema between revelation and entrapment which the minds behind the movie either can’t grasp or refuse to acknowledge. So much of the content within the film is beyond dark, disturbing, and twisted, with much of the unpleasantness coming from the various actions performed by nearly ALL of the film’s characters, including the supposed “good guys.” Speaking of the characters, nearly everyone in the film is painted as such one-dimensional figures, with hairstyles and costumes being used to take the place of motivations and personal ideology. Yet in a way, the biggest aspect hampering Clooney’s film is the fact that the movie is always looking at events from a distance, never fully engaging with the material at hand, suggesting that the film’s creative minds might have thought Suburbicon too dark even for them.
The only time Suburbicon comes close to working is when the movie looks at things through Nicky’s eyes. It’s here when the angle of distance between child and grown-up works because we are discovering the shocking revelations at the same time and in their purest, oddest forms. It’s also here where Suburbicon functions in part as a tale of growing up. Nicky’s witnessing such alarming acts and how they transform the family life he thought he had forces him to grow up incredibly fast and brings to the forefront a newly formed set of survival skills. It’s these specific skills which he knows he must employ if he is to survive the seemingly perfect, yet ultimately dark world of Suburbicon. Aiding in the trajectory of Nicky’s journey is the film’s wonderfully off-center music, which proves a huge asset. Throughout Suburbicon, the musical score, which carries with it a sense of grandness and manic fear, accentuates the weirdness of the world Clooney and the Coens have crafted. Enough weird moments come up every now and again, offering up (totally) unexpected chuckles and making enough of an impression for the audience to remember that they are indeed watching a Coen brothers brainchild. Yet none of it comes anywhere close enough to save Suburbicon.
Damon and Moore are fine in their roles, but the characters they play aren’t really given much exploration beyond their oftentimes despicable actions. Most actors love to play bad guys, but these are low-lifes without any definable traits. Hassell and Fleshler make for appealing bad guys and Oscar Isaac pops up for a couple of fun scenes as an insurance investigator taunting Gardner and Margaret. Yet the true star of the film is Jupe, who, between this and his work in last year’s Wonder, is quickly becoming one of the most talented child actors of his generation.
There’s a subplot popping up throughout the course of Suburbicon featuring a black family who moves into the same neighborhood as Gardner and his family. The family in question is taunted and tormented to no end by the all-white neighborhood, which only adds the anger and discomfort of the rest of the film. I get that Clooney decided to incorporate the story into the movie as a way of showing how black people aren’t always the only ones capable of crime and menace and how just a few houses down, the real danger is taking place. While that must have been the intent, the inclusion of the black family’s plight comes across as awkward, distracting, and disjointed. The subplot, based on a true story of a black family who moved into an all-white Pennsylvania neighborhood in the ‘50s and were subjected to such viciousness, is worthy of its own movie, preferably one far far better than Suburbicon.
The Package
The release of Suburbicon features a handful of extras, including a featurette centered on the real-life story that makes up the film’s stark sub-plot and shows Clooney stating how the film was funnier before the results of the 2016 election.
The Lowdown
Odd and off-putting in the worst possible ways, Suburbicon is a curio of a film whose bad parts greatly outweigh its good ones.
Suburbicon is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.
