FILM OF THE WEEK

Suburbicon

Cert: 15A; Now showing

George Clooney’s career behind the camera may have peaked early with 2005’s rather excellent sophomore outing Good Night, And Good Luck., a McCarthyism drama that built on the promise shown in directorial debut Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind. Since then, it’s been more mixed, with 2014’s sloppy The Monuments Men a low-point.

Suburbicon somewhat argues that we should persevere with Clooney as a director of scope and dexterity even if not everything he throws at the wall sticks.

Retooling a shelved Coen Bros screenplay, Clooney goes for full-on Hitchcock pastiche — Alexandre Desplat’s score even apes Bernard Herrmann — as he takes us out to the late 1950s where rolling suburbia as far as the eye can see is heralding a new age in US society. Or that was the plan, at least.

Matt Damon is Gardner Lodge, your archetypal middle-class, middle-management family man. One night, hoodlums break into the house he shares with wife Rose (Julianne Moore) and their son. Rose is killed, and in the aftermath, her twin sister (Moore again) moves in and fills that void seamlessly.

Something is up and the truth will out.

The arch humour of the Coens is channelled well by Clooney and, although underdeveloped, a parallel narrative involving persecuted African-American neighbours is an interesting way to show-up the privileged context from which these greedy white lives make trouble for themselves. A cast that includes Oscar Isaac and Gary Basaraba is virtually faultless.

The strange, knock-kneed energy that pervades Suburbicon is not entirely problematic but there is still an incomplete, disposable feel to it as the credits roll.