Suburbicon

2017 wasn't a particularly good year for Matt Damon.  His two Big High Profile Fall Movies bombed with audiences and critics.  He made some regrettable comments in light of the MeToo movement.  It happens in Hollywood.   Matt's buddy Ben Affleck suffered a double whammy the year before with his anticipated THE ACCOUNTANT and LIVE BY NIGHT, both of which were widely considered to be disappointments.

The Damon films, DOWNSIZING and SUBURBICON, were eagerly anticipated by your reviewer.  The former was directed by Alexander Payne, one of the few whose films I make special effort to see in a theater.  I found it to be a confused, yet noble failure, one that gradually dispensed with its original, fascinating concept and became a self-conscious tract of sorts.   SUBURBICON?  Director George Clooney, with his producing partner Grant Heslov, reworked an old Coen Bros script set in the 1950s.  The plot involved a FARGO-like crime with a potent subplot about very ugly racism.  It sounded promising.

Clooney's films as director have been mostly unimpressive. While GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK and CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND were decent to good efforts, the rest have suffered from highly lackluster treatments of interesting subjects.  The nadir was LEATHERHEADS, while THE MONUMENTS MEN wasn't much better, again suffering a plodding approach.  THE IDES OF MARCH offered nothing new to a time worn premise. Clooney always has at least one or two good visual ideas, but seems to lack the ability to fashion a solid or innovative narrative, much less a work of art like some of the directors with whom he's collaborated.

Joel and Ethan Coen fit that bill, and having their sometime lead actor direct their script seemed just the ticket to rescue the latter's career.  Instead, it may have been a final shovel pat.  The reviews were coming in fast and vicious in the fall of '17, and SUBURBICON slipped out of theaters quickly.  I can't recall reading one positive thing about the movie.  Is it really that bad?

For me, it was a little better than expected.  The film's hour and forty five minutes played effortlessly and entertainingly, if not entirely engagingly.  SUBURBICON is mainly about the aftermath of a home invasion  that reveals itself to be something far different than initially surmised in the titular bedroom community.  Damon portrays Everyman Gardner Lodge, whose wife Rose (Julianne Moore) perishes after the robbers overdo it with the cholorform.  Gardner and his son Nicky (Noah Jupe) are left to grieve with Rose's twin sister Margaret (also Moore), who moves in.  Nicky soon begins to suspect something is very fishy.

Meanwhile, a black family moves into the lily white Suburbicon, inspiring the neighbors to post a twenty four vigil of taunting outside their house. On a practical note, I wondered when these people worked for a living.  Clooney features numerous scenes of the angry whites shouting, mocking, banging metal objects, and singing to the Mayer family, who daily put on a brave face and stay put.  But in 1959 (and well, anytime), these things tended to end badly.

Neither story thread is handled very well, but the racial subplot is badly underdeveloped and almost an afterthought.  Clooney's intentions and statements are impossible to miss but put forth with as heavy a hand as I can recall seeing of late. I'm not sure if the Mayers' story was part of the Coens' original screenplay, which was written back in the '80s and should've remained hidden in a drawer, honestly.

The Lodges' story is just a second rate crime drama, an ersatz noir that fails even as pulp fiction.  The dark comedy falls flat, the actors (aside from a terrific Oscar Isaac as a sharp as a whip insurance agent) seem curiously disengaged and disinterested, and even the dialogue is dull.  The director's attempts to evoke period atmosphere is weak, too. Clooney does bring off a few Coenesque moments, as when Gardner has an awkward conversation with his boss, and I liked the use of silhouette for one scene, but otherwise SUBURBICON, while not entirely deadly, is a real misfire.