Film review: ‘Suburbicon’

Satirically or otherwise, “Suburbicon” isn’t even a little funny|

As a thought experiment, ask yourself if you’d be willing to sit through the worst movie Joel and Ethan Coen ever made. The film would be recognizably Coen-esque, with some familiar stylistic tics but none of the meaty plotlines or sharp dialogue.

You’d get something like “Suburbicon,” the new picture directed by George Clooney. Unfortunately for Mr. Clooney and his strong cast, the Coens had enough courage to keep this script in a drawer for 30 years but not enough courage to burn every copy.

The film uses an overused trope – that the planned community of Suburbicon is not as placid as its homogenous surface would suggest – and returns to that most overused decade, the lily-white 1950s.

Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) is a white-collar office stiff losing his grip - you can tell because he’s always anxiously squeezing wrist exercisers. After work, he toddles back to his heavily-draped home where he finds his timid son Nicky (Noah Jupe), his sister-in-law Margaret (Julianne Moore) and his wheelchair-bound wife Rose (also Julianne Moore, for whatever reason).

Luckily for Moore, she quickly only has to play one of the two roles, as a couple of snarling stooges, Sloan (Glenn Fleshler) and Louis (Alex Hassell), arrive and chloroform Rose to death while the others watch. Margaret is notably willing to step into a role as surrogate wife to Gardner - even getting a “Vertigo”-inspired hair dye to match the blonde locks of her dead sister. Our immediate suspicions of an unsavory imbroglio with the widower are confirmed when Nicky discovers Gardner and Margaret, sans pants and wielding ping pong paddles improperly.

Who is Matt Damon supposed to be playing? As a married man feeling the walls closing in around him, he offers nothing close to the tragedy of William H. Macy’s husband in “Fargo.” Gardner supposedly owes money to the mob but he isn’t really interesting enough to owe money to the mob.

We know he is shady when he doesn’t identify the chloroform killers from a police lineup, but we have insufficient knowledge of the circumstances that set those men upon Rose. Soon, Bud Cooper, a dapper life insurance claims investigator played by Oscar Isaac, appears on the scene smelling a rat. He is by far the best thing in the movie and therefore condemned to only two scenes.

If one bad mob plot isn’t enough, there is an entirely separate bad mob plot involving a terror campaign waged by the citizenry of Suburbicon on the first African-American family to move into the neighborhood. The Mayerses are under constant danger of lynching from a seething mass of Confederate flag-draped rage but, crucially, the mob is more realistic than the people they threaten. The elder Mayers are blank spaces and we know them only through their boy, Andy (Tony Espinosa), who sometimes plays catch with Nicky in the backyard.

Clooney’s direction, as always, is pedestrian, this time with an odd focus on shots from a kid’s eye view and inexplicably schmaltzy music cues. The Coens’ best and darkest films are filled with humor, from “Blood Simple” to “No Country for Old Men.” And, satirically or otherwise, “Suburbicon” isn’t even a little funny – the best bits are for people who feel there aren’t enough jokes about Episcopalians in movies anymore.

The Coens are also laudable for their frictionless speed – the recent period piece “Hail, Caesar!” felt like it ended moments after it began. “Suburbicon” spends glacially long minutes to reach even the most rudimentary plot twists – the entire story would perhaps make a decent first act for a film noir. A late acceleration of the body count does little to leaven the omnipresent boredom.

UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy:
  • This is a family newspaper, please use a kind and respectful tone.
  • No profanity, hate speech or personal attacks. No off-topic remarks.
  • No disinformation about current events.
  • We will remove any comments — or commenters — that do not follow this commenting policy.