‘Suburbicon:’ A Film inspired by Levittown
One of the most unsettling chapters of Eastern Pennsylvania history was an inspiration for the film.
One of the most unsettling chapters in the history of Eastern Pennsylvania provided the inspiration for “Suburbicon,” George Clooney’s latest directorial effort which is now in area theaters.
It all started last year when Clooney and production partner Grant Heslov were searching for material for their follow-up to “Monuments Men.” While mulling over a number of potential projects, Clooney became rattled by the rhetoric of many GOP politicians, particularly Donald Trump.
“The genesis of the screenplay started when I was watching a lot of speeches on the campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating minorities,” recalls Clooney.
“I started looking around at other times in our history when we’ve unfortunately fallen back into these things, and I found this story that happened in Levittown, Pennsylvania, [a planned Bucks County community which refused to sell homes to African-Americans].
“Grant and I [decided] to try and make a film out of the Levittown, Pennsylvania story. But then I remembered the Coen Brothers had written “Suburbicon” and I thought it would be kind of the perfect match.”
With the blessing of Joel and Ethan Coen, Clooney and Heslov decided to graft the story of Levittown onto the already-existing screenplay. The result is a socially conscious crime comedy that’s already netted mostly positive reviews on the festival circuit.
Matt Damon stars in the movie as a 1950s-era husband and father who is far from the solid citizen he appears to be. Julianne Moore plays dual roles as his wheelchair-bound wife and his wife’s saucier twin sister.
Eventually, Damon’s dirty dealings entangle the town’s only African-American couple (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke), even as the pair faces constant harassment from their neighbors.
As the Hollywood Reporter noted, one of the movie’s most pronounced themes is “sniffing the rot beneath the manicured lawns” of suburbia.
“When you talk about making America great again, everyone assumes this was the Eisenhower ‘50s,” says Clooney. “Of course, it was great if you were a white, straight male but for others, it probably wasn’t so great.
“It’s fun to lift up that curtain and look underneath that thin veneer, and see some of the real problems that this country has yet to completely come to terms with. I thought [the movie] was a fun way to explore these issues.”
“Suburbicon” marks the sixth directorial effort by Clooney. He began his directing career in 2002 with the Chuck Barris biopic “Confesssions of a A Dangerous Mind” and enjoyed his biggest critical success with “Good Luck, and Good Night,” a docudrama about broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and his efforts to put an end to the antiCommunist crusade of Senator Joe McCarthy.
In recent years, Clooney has directed “Leatherheads,” “The Ides of March” and “Monuments Men,” which was his big-
gest commercial success.
After conducting months of research, Clooney is something of an expert on Levittown, and its founder William Levitt’s efforts to keep people of color from residing in his community.
Even though Levitt refused to sell homes to blacks, in 1957, Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx, resold their Levittown home to William and Daisy Myers, who became the first African-Americans to live in the development.
Not surprisingly, the Myerses didn’t have an easy time of it. In fact, the couple was met with nightly verbal harassment by their white neighbors. Rocks were thrown through the Myers’ windows and crosses burned in their yard.
When Daisy refused to back down, she became famous and was dubbed “the Rosa Parks of the North.”
“This isn’t a movie about Donald Trump,” says Clooney. “This is a movie about our coming to terms with the idea that we have never addressed our issues with race, fully. We’ve tried.
“When your hear [a character in the film] read a petition where he says, “We favor integration but only when these people educate themselves.” That’s the actual petition that was read in Levittown, Pennsylvania. We didn’t write that. We found it.
“People didn’t think they were being bigots. They’re saying, “I’m not a bigot. [African-Americans] just don’t educate themselves and I don’t want uneducated people here.’ “
“It’s that subtlety which is the part [of the problem] that we are still trying to cope with. It is a big part of our history and it will be a part of our history for a long period of time to come.”
“Suburbicon” isn’t just about race or the dark side of the American Dream. The movie also offers up the sight of Matt Damon playing a knucklehead who slowly slips into full-tilt villainy.
“It’s a funny thing about monsters…they don’t just twist their mustaches and turn into bad people,” says Clooney. “You’re formed and it happens through a series of really stupid mistakes and compounding them.
“[Damon] makes a plan, not particularly wellthought out and not the best of plans, obviously, but at every single fork in the road in which [he] makes a choice, he makes the wrong choice.
“[He] hires killers because [he’s] not a killer and then he become a killer along the way…. By the end when Matt sits with his son, he is not who he was when the movie started. He became a monster along the way.”
For all its darkness “Suburbicon” is far from a downbeat experience. Like the Coen Brothers-scripted-and-directed “Fargo” and “Burn After Reading,” the movie supplies plenty of laughs even if they occasionally wind up sticking in your throat.
“We didn’t want this to just be a polemic, a civics lesson,” says Clooney. “We wanted it to be funny. We wanted it to be mean. It’s an angry movie and it got angrier as we were shooting.”