Movie Reaction: Suburbicon

Formula: Pleasantville * Fargo

The George Clooney directed, Coen brothers co-penned crime movie Suburbicon is about an idyllic 50s suburb that is rocked when two events occur almost at the same time: a black family moves into a neighborhood and, soon after, their neighbors endure a home invasion that leaves the mother dead. As you'd expect from anything written by the Coens, the world is populated by distinct characters and the story unfolds in the nihilistic and fatal manner that they are known for. The cast is filled with Coen brothers repertory players like Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, and Matt Damon. On paper, this couldn't be more of a blueprint of a Coen brothers movie. Because of that, the failure of Suburbicon serves as a great reminder of how irreplaceable the Coens are.

Suburbicon is not a very good movie. I have trouble even calling it moderately entertaining. The best way I can describe it is this. Let's say if when NASA was planning the moon landing*, all of their individual calculations were 1% off. None of those miscalculations on their own would ruin the mission, but the compounded effect would result in the space shuttle exploding before it even left that atmosphere. Well, that's Suburbicon. Everything feels a little off, and when everything is a little off, the whole film really misses the mark. The characters are odd without being interesting. Absurdities which would normally be really funny fall flat. The satire feels toothless. It's weird. There wasn't that much that I actually hated about the movie, but I could see how so much of it came close to working that it irritated me even more.

*Note: I know very little about how space shuttles work, but my go to analogy is exactly what happened to Suburbicon, which leaves me scrambling for non-movie examples.

Part of it is that this movie was sold all wrong in the advertising. It's not really a satire of 50s idealism. Some of that is there at the beginning. It immediately moves in some really lazy race commentary. It's the kind of over the top racism that let's people now watch it and say "Boy, racism sure was bad back then" without really shining a light on anything now. The racial unrest is going on in the background throughout the movie, but it's literally only there to create a distraction so the main story can happen unimpeded. Frankly, it's an ugly use of social commentary. Like, imagine if it turned out everything about race in GetOut was only there for a story about the danger of taking science too far.

The main story is under-cooked. Matt Damon plays a man whose house is invaded by two men one night. He, his son (Noah Jupe), his wife, and his sister-in-law (both played by Julianne Moore) are drugged, and his wife is accidentally killed. There's something more nefarious going on  that's uncovered over time, in part by Oscar Isaac, who plays an insurance claims investigator (an unexpectedly minor role). This is all seen through the eyes of the son, who is the main character. That perspective is needed in order to maintain the central mystery of the movie, but it creates more problems than it's probably worth. Namely, it leaves nothing for Matt Damon (or Julianne Moore) to play. Imagine in Fargo how useless Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) would be if the story wasn't largely from his perspective. I'm probably giving away too much of the story by making that comparison, but it's my best way to explain it. Damon doesn't get to bring anything to the role. Moore at least gets a little bit to do with Isaac.

The movie isn't very funny. I don't know if George Clooney's direction is to blame or if it's something about the script (which, for the record, was from the pile of scripts the Coens had already passed on - for good reason, it seems). Out of context - like in a trailer - a lot of moments look like they should be funny. In the context of the film, few of them are, or they just call to mind times that something similar was done much better in a Coen-directed movie.

The shadow of the Coen brothers looms large over Suburbicon and that's to its detriment. This does fit with Clooney's other directed works though. He seems to specialize in approximations of what another director has done before. Sometimes it works out great (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck). Lately, it's been more underwhelming (The Monuments Men, The Ides of March). Suburbicon is an odd case of a movie that isn't unwatchable because it's bad. It's unwatchable because is so frustratingly close to being a really good movie.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend