2017’s Suburbicon feels like somebody trying too hard to be the Coen brothers, something which never works out well. What is really confusing is director George Clooney authored the script with the brothers, so now we have the Coens participating in a poor imitation of themselves.
Matt Damon stars in this alongside Julianne Moore and, courtesy of modern digital technology, a second Julianne Moore. One is blond and confined to a wheelchair, while the other is brunette. Seeing two Juliannes side-by-side, I realized I immediately had a new fantasy stored in the wank bank.
The blond one is married to Damon. She is also the mother of their young son (Noah Jupe). Together, they live in the titular community, a tired parody of such 1950’s suburbs as Levittown, PA.
At first, I thought the movie was going to be focused on racism, as the community is riled by a Black family moving in next door. Admittedly, there was a mildly amusing scene near the beginning, where a meeting comprised of only white males drafts an emergency ordinance of a “separate but equal” nature, appropriating such phrases as “we shall overcome” while doing so.
Jupe befriends the only child of this new family (Tony Espinosa) and I thought that was what instigated the moment of weird violence that is about to happen. I was wrong, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Jupe is woken by his father in the middle of the night. I found what Damon says as he carries the boy downstairs to be unnerving: “You need to wake up. There are men in the house. They are going to take what they want and then leave.”
Two intimidating characters, played by Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell, are those men in the house. Fleshler is especially intimidating, just as he was when he was the villain on the first season of True Detective.
I was stunned Damon and the others just go along with everything they’re told to do, culminating in them being tied to kitchen chairs. Each of them is then chloroformed. We change to Jupe’s perspective as he awakens in a hospital, where he learns his mom is dead.
It isn’t long before her sister moves into the house. As if it wasn’t weird enough having Moore’s digital doppelganger around, the brunette proceeds to dye her hair blond. In one very eye-opening scene, Jupe stumbles upon her being spanked by Damon using a ping-pong paddle, which immediately became part of that new fantasy in my head.
I mentioned I thought racism would be a major factor in the plot, except it is so for only one of the plots. There are angry crowds outside the house of the Black family all day and night, but that doesn’t have anything directly to do with what is happening at the house of Damon and Moore.
Once I realized the plots are parallel, but without much impact on each other, it wasn’t any strain to figure out Damon had hired Fleshler and Hassell to kill his wheelchair-bound wife, with the intention of paying off the thugs with the life insurance money he hopes to collect. What he didn’t expect is a crooked insurance investigator (Jason Isaacs) who can see right through the scheme and demands the money himself. None of these developments are surprising.
It is hard to say why Suburbicon doesn’t work, but I honestly would have been surprised if it had. One half of it is a tired and rather predictable tale of an insurance fraud murder. On a parallel track, we have a tormented Black family we never really get to know well, in a shallow examination of racism which does not produce any trenchant insights.
I wonder how far the Coen brothers had this particular script down in their drawer of undeveloped projects, and why they didn’t leave it where it was.
Dir: George Clooney
Starring Matt Damon and two Julianne Moores
Watched on Kanopy