Suburban horror show misses mark
Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac Good neighbourhood, bad neighbours. GEORGE Clooney, bless him, takes his duty as a storyteller seriously. With the six movies he’s directed, he’s obviously aimed to address political and social issues while spinning an entertaining yarn.
It’s a noble ambition, and one that should be applauded. The only problem is the movies generally aren’t all that memorable.
He got off to a great start with the offbeat black comedy Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and the true-life newsroom drama Good Night, and Good Luck. But since then, it’s been the law of diminishing returns when Clooney has stepped behind the camera.
His latest effort, Suburbicon, illustrates his problems as a filmmaker. Clooney tends to combine the best of intentions with the most lacklustre of executions.
At first glance, it seems like Suburbicon is a sure thing. A script by the Coen brothers (which Clooney rewrote with creative partner Grant Heslov) and a cast headed by Matt Damon and Julianne Moore can’t help but inspire confidence.
But Clooney’s rewrite of the screenplay reportedly added a parallel plot about racial tension (based on actual events) in the story’s suburban enclave.
It’s a move that makes sense — having an innocuous African-American family targeted with hostility while the dirty deeds of their next-door neighbours goes unnoticed could add some interesting dramatic and thematic subtext to Suburbicon.
But the two don’t mesh, and what was seemingly set up as a jet-black story of bad behaviour in a “good” neighbourhood now feels unwieldy, clunky and awkwardly earnest.
What’s more, Clooney doesn’t really have the Coens’ knack for elegantly shifting between tones and moods. The suspense and the gallows humour uneasily bump up against one another rather than smoothly intermingling, and the pace is downright sluggish.
It’s a shame, because the foundations of something nicely grim were solidly in place. Clooney simply fails to build on them.
It’s 1959, and the community of Suburbicon is the epitome of post-WWII American exceptionalism.
Nice houses, thriving businesses, friendly neighbours. Well, until the first black family moves into the all-white area, that is.
While that family deals with everescalating antagonism, there’s something genuinely sinister happening next door at the home of Gardner Lodge (Damon).
A recent home invasion saw Gardner, his wife Rose and sister-in-law Margaret (both played by Moore) and son Nicky (Noah Jupe) tied up and drugged by a pair of thugs.
Gardner, Margaret and Nicky eventually wake up. Rose does not.
And when Nicky sees his dad failing to identify the offenders when they’re standing in a police line-up, it’s clear something shady is going on.
Anyone who’s ever caught a film noir may be able to predict the chain of events from then on, but the Coens’ script occasionally throws in a nasty swerve or colourful twist, such as a canny insurance investigator played by Oscar Isaac, whose performance gives Suburbicon a brief jolt of electricity.