The awkward white guilt of George Clooney

Spare a thought for Suburbicon, as it swiftly vanishes from megaplexes. This is George Clooney’s movie about — well, I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be the sort of movie that doesn’t get made much anymore: starry, not that expensive, “middlebrow.” It’s also supposed to be the sort of movie that you’re unsurprised they still make, but that I, at least, always am: principled, radioactively principled.

If the movies are in trouble (and domestically things aren’t great at the box office, and this film bombed), it’s partly because the vast middle has gone out of filmmaking, and with it have gone memorable characters, screenwriting, risk and fun — as well as a kind of moderate seriousness that didn’t prostrate itself before Oscar voters.

Suburbicon feels like a last gasp of some kind of middle. It thinks it’s both frivolous and serious. But, for that, you need a touch that George Clooney has never had. So one feels pitted against the other. He seems determined to take his usual mix of earnestness and square sense of humour into some approximation of the civil rights era. The movie is set in a 1950s Pennsylvania enclave and asks a couple, played by Matt Damon and Julianne Moore, to ignore the scores of white people rioting outside the home of a black family whose backyard ends where theirs begins. (To be fair, I guess, the rioting is happening out in front.)

Damon plays Gardner Lodge, one of those in-over-his-head milquetoasts — thick in the waist, horn-rimmed glasses, starch everywhere — that not even the actor has figured out. Moore plays both his wife, Patricia, and his sister-in-law, Maggie, by pumping different amounts of air into each woman’s lines. One night, a couple of robbers show up at their house. Somebody dies. And the Lodges’ son Nicky — 10? 11? 12? — spends the movie trying to figure out what’s going on. He’s the moral centre. He also feels like the target audience.

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the script. But so did Clooney, with Grant Heslov. So it’s Fargo made by people who thought Fargo needed more white guilt. It’s got the Coens’ fat men, slapstick and glibness, slathered with Clooney’s moral piety. Every once in awhile, the movie will cut from whatever is happening at the Lodges’ house to whatever madness is going on outside the home of their new black neighbours. Mostly, it’s a lot of white extras shouting and waving things at a facade. Someone stomps on a car and situates a Confederate flag in a broken window. At some point, Oscar Isaac, easy as ever, shows up as an insurance adjuster who puts too fine a point on it all: “You’d think we were in Mississippi.” Matt Damon, director George Clooney and cinematographer Robert Elswit on the set of Suburbicon. If Hollywood movies are in trouble, something as confused as Suburbicon will hasten the demise, Wesley Morris writes.

Nice try. We’re just in hoary old Hollywood, where showing a problem tends to be confused with addressing it. All we know about the family across the way — they’re the Mayerses — is that they’re new homeowners and that they’re black. And boy, are they restrained. When racists scream at her, Mrs. Mayers doesn’t scream back. She merely continues to the pin laundry on the clothesline. When she experiences a customized price hike at the grocery store (for her, every item is suddenly $20), she relents and makes the sort of stoic exit that a movie like this needs to double as a triumph of dignity.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mayers barely gets a line. But he mows a mean lawn. Their kid spends the movie playing with Nicky, who’s mandated to do it by his aunt. The mandate extends to Clooney, whose sense of social progressivism hits a ceiling. The way the Mayers family functions isn’t all that different from how Dianne Reeves’ jazz singing and the footage of the actual Annie Lee Moss’ testimony are deployed in Clooney’s 2005 docudrama, Good Night, and Good Luck.

They were flicking at progressivism that the movie didn’t have the political bandwidth to get into. But the difference is that both women (neither of whom achieves character status) are part of the movie’s wider sanctimony in re-creating Edward R. Murrow’s battle in the 1950s with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his televised antiCommunist witch hunt. It’s righteousness on Ambien. But I put up with the movie’s turning Reeves and the footage of Moss into weapons: They served the movie’s thematic strategy. Unlike Suburbicon, it had an argument. McCarthyism really is bad.

Yet it seems that in his films, “dignified” is the only way Clooney wants to imagine black people. Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain U.S. pasts, I’m both annoyed and relieved. “Back then” can provide cover for an all-white cast. It can feel like an excuse or a hide out. But filmmakers might want to be careful about where the time machine sends them. Sofia Coppola’s went back to the Civil War, for The Beguiled. Rather than deal with the moral centrality of slavery, she simply freed the slaves herself. Sometimes you get very good filmmaking anyway. You also get gentrification.

Clooney has directed six movies; five are set in the middle of the previous century. And Suburbicon clarifies why. Race is a blind spot. None of the scenes with the Mayerses go on for more than 90 seconds; most last less than 15. And all are intended as a moral counterpoint to the darkening frivolity going on at the Lodges’. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis got at this inequality in her review of the film. The casting telegraphs the movie’s priorities. The black actors — Karimah Westbrook, Tony Espinosa and Leith M. Burke — may not be as famous the movie’s white stars, but Clooney hasn’t given them a chance to show whether they’re also as good.

In September, after the Suburbicon première at the Toronto International Film Festival, he told David Sims, of The Atlantic, that he knows his approach is imperfect. “In all fairness, there are a lot of people better qualified to make the African-American story in suburbia, I think,” Clooney said.

“There’s a version of this film I’d like to see from the other side that could be better represented by someone who can speak to that better than me, and probably should.” He went on: “I think my version was what I know, which is white angst and the fear of losing your place to minorities.” He also said that he’d like to see others directors — Ava DuVernay or Steve McQueen, say — do a version of this story.

Sure, it’s possible that the white riots happening in Suburbicon reflect the current tour of white nationalist pop-up events. And perhaps somewhere inside this movie lives a farce that reckons with white indifference in the face of national catastrophe. But no one had the audacity to find it. The movie is the catastrophe, instead. During the era in which this movie is set, you would get dramas like Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, from 1950, or Pressure Point, a social drama from 1962 that Stanley Kramer had a hand in. They both star Sidney Poitier, and neither is afraid of at least trying to see race “from the other side.” The violent, relentless depiction of racism in No Way Out, complete with a race riot, is actually still pretty shocking. They’re as square as the movies Clooney tends to make, but they’re also daring, however imperfectly, to look right at the present rather than hunkering down in the past.

The big surprise of Jordan Peele’s Get Out is its conception of a racism that doesn’t need lynch mobs or a Confederate flag to make its point. Good, liberal white people — the ones for whom “I voted for Obama” is supposed to be an icebreaker — inflict as much harm as obvious bad ones. Clooney is not humanizing the Mayerses, per se. He is using them. The sad thing is that he didn’t need to. The black characters have nothing to do with the plot of this movie. They’re here almost against their will, kept in the whitecontrolled existential purgatory that Peele’s movie identifies as the sunken place.

By the final bogusly optimistic shot, it’s obvious what Suburbicon wants you to know: this movie voted for Obama.

If Hollywood movies are in trouble, something as confused as this one signals a hastening of their demise. Most of me will always wants some version of this middlebrow entertainment in my life. But if fighting to keep that kind of movie alive also means fighting for the cynicism of Suburbicon, the rest of me wants to say get out.