Suburbicon
2 stars
Director: George Clooney
Stars: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac
Duration: 105 mins
Class: 15
KRS Releasing Ltd
George Clooney – actor, director, writer, producer, heartthrob, humanitarian and by all accounts, all-round nice guy. Which is why it pains me to diss his latest effort behind the camera, a strange hybrid of racial drama, murder mystery and satire, which left me rather cold.
Clooney’s work as director has consistently been strong on narrative, with 2005’s Good Night and Good Luck, an ode to 1950s TV journalism icon Edward R. Murrow, a standout, and his other attempts. These include his assertive directorial debut in 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and 2011’s The Ides of March, a pointed tale of idealism in politics going sour (at a time when politics as a whole began to go sour).
To my mind, even the poorly-received The Monuments Men, a spunky wartime caper released in 2014, had a lot going for it. Yet, with Suburbicon, Clooney seems to have missed the mark.
Painfully shallow, follows a totally predictable path
The film starts promisingly enough, as a typical 1950s advertisement with a perky voice-over extolling the joys of the titular Suburbicon, the epitome of the American Dream. This is a 1950s suburb which enjoys a strong sense of community and whose residents look to a wonderful future. It segues into a typical day in the neighbourhood as the local postman delivers a letter to the newly-arrived Meyers’s African-American ‘maid’, only to be flummoxed to find out that the woman is in fact Mrs Meyers herself.
That an African-American family has moved into this suburban town leads to outrage at the town hall. There are scenes further on in the film of fences being built around the Meyers’s home, before racial riots break out in the street.
Your guess as to what the film is trying to say here is as good as mine, with the Meyers being summarily relegated to the background with no chance to develop as three-dimensional characters. They are merely cyphers for us to see, one assumes, how racist people really are under their shiny, happy, friendly veneer.
The main thread of the story has Clooney’s friend and frequent collaborator Matt Damon as Gardner Lodge, husband to Julianne Moore’s wheelchair-bound Rose and father to young Nick (Noah Jupe). As the community is coming to terms with the arrival of the Meyers, a second tragedy rocks the neighbourhood – a home invasion by two rather unsavoury characters into the Lodge’s home which leaves Rose dead.
After the funeral, her twin sister Margaret (also Moore) moves in with Gardner and Nick, ostensibly to help take care of the latter. But, as the young boy soon comes to realise, she is also there to offer comfort to his father, whose increasingly sinister behaviour arouses suspicions in Nick.
It would appear that Clooney’s intention was to satirise the idyll of life during the era by shining a light on its dark underbelly. And, while he and his technical team do a good job in capturing the ambience of the era, the script by him and collaborators Grant Heslov and the Coen Brothers (no less) is painfully shallow, follows a totally predictable path and has frequent changes in tone which don’t quite work.
Moreover, the characters are only thinly sketched and come nowhere near the quality of the complex, quirky and dark characters that often emerge from the Coens’ imagination.
The final nail in the coffin is the unengaging performances from both Damon and Moore, two of the strongest actors in Hollywood today. Damon is particularly bland, adding little shades to his overall grey character to the point you can’t tell if he is angry, sad, guilty, worried or whatnot. And, eventually, you can’t care because by this point it is clear where the story is going. It is up to Jupe to add some colour, the young Nick providing the little emotional engagement for the audience as his increasingly-growing suspicions put him in harm’s way.