Seeing double in Clooney’s Suburbicon
Suburbicon
K (out of 4) Starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe, Karimah Westbrook, Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell. Directed by George Clooney. Opens Friday in GTA theatres. 104 minutes. 14A
There are two-tone cars in the driveway, twin sisters on the porch and a whole lot of dangerous duplicity in George Clooney’s Suburbicon.
Double your flavour, double your fun? Not so fast. There are also two movies happening within this 1950sset film noir and that isn’t so keen.
Clooney and his production partner Grant Heslov took an unproduced script by the Coen Bros., a scam-gone-wrong drama best described as Fargo lite, and added some nasty truth to the absurdist drama.
It’s the real-life racism of Levittown, Pa., the planned community of vanilla ’50s conformity that Suburbicon riffs on.
The 1957 arrival to Levittown of its first African-American couple, William and Daisy Myers (called Mayers in the film, played by Leith M. Burke and Karimah Westbrook) sparked acts of white-on-Black violence. Liberal thinkers of America’s supposedly enlightened northern states were shocked to find they could be just as appalling as KKK members of the Deep South.
These stories unspool in tandem, literally across the street from each other, but the two intersect mainly in their postcard-perfect production design.
The drama stars Clooney pal Matt Damon as bespectacled dweeb Gardner Lodge, a financial non-wizard who is so low on energy he can barely rouse himself to get excited when a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) invade his house one night like a malevolent Laurel and Hardy. (How these numbskulls found the right home among the look-alike boxes is a puzzle.)
The thugs use chloroform to clumsily knock out Gardner and his family: his wheelchair-bound wife Rose (Julianne Moore), her dim twin sister Margaret (also played by Moore) and the Lodges’ preteen son Nicky (Noah Jupe).
Cut to a hospital scene, and something unforeseen has occurred that will bring Gardner and Margaret closer together and turn Nicky into an amateur sleuth, as pieces of a jagged-edge puzzle begin to fit together.
Soon we’ll meet a real sleuth: insurance claim investigator Bud Cooper (Oscar Isaac), who dresses like a member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack and who claims he can smell a rodent — the insurance-scamming kind — from a mile away. Maybe he’s not so good, though, at sussing just how bad people can really be.
Meanwhile, the Mayers family is living in a suburban version of Dan- te’s Inferno. Declared unwanted by Suburbicon’s racist and mistitled “Betterment Committee,” the Mayers are stoically enduring everything from dirty looks and jacked-up prices at the grocery store to full-on mob attacks on their home by a Confederate flag-waving mob.
Paying almost silent witness to all this hatred are the two sons of the main families: the Lodges’ Nicky and the Mayers’ Andy (Tony Espinosa), who bond over a shared love of baseball and garter snakes.
There’s so much going on in Suburbicon and so much that isn’t con- necting, it’s tempting to write the film off as a noble failure by Clooney and Heslov, who understandably wanted to inject some social currency — shades of Charlottesville 2017 — into a story that’s almost as prefab as their title community.
With the exception of Isaac, whose brief scenes make you wish he were the star of the film, the actors look like they’re at low tide. This is especially true of Damon, who has played losers like Gardner before. You could almost cut into this film scenes from his character in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! Few might be the wiser, apart from the moustache.
There is so much going on in Suburbicon and so much that isn’t connecting, it’s tempting to write the film off as a noble failure by Clooney and Heslov
All this being said, however, I’m inclined to give Suburbicon a mild thumbs up. This is based on a second viewing where I switched my gaze from Damon’s performance to that of young Jupe, a casting coup, who functions as the film’s conscience. Clooney and his crew got this part exactly right.
Jupe’s Nicky watches with fearful and disbelieving eyes the nasty affairs of the adult world, which he’s inclined to gaze at from foot level as he hides behind a door or under a bed.
We might guess what he’s thinking: This is what life is like inside a planned community?
How awful must it be in the untamed world outside Suburbicon’s protective gates?