It’s possible that the Coen Brothers are both the best and the worst thing to have happened to George Clooney‘s Hollywood career. The narcissistic idiots he has played for them on more than one occasion added a comedically self-aware string to his acting bow and gave him some of his most memorable characters, vainglorious buffoons he clearly relished playing because when you suffer through life as George Clooney it’s got to be refreshing to have your absurdly handsome leading-man status not taken seriously. As director of the Coens co-scripted “Suburbicon,” however the results are more mixed: their voice is so unmistakable that it rather swamps Clooney’s more sincere, classical style, which only comes through in a subplot stitched into the screenplay by Clooney and writing partner Grant Heslov. The joints show, making the enjoyable but just-not-quite-there “Suburbicon” feel like Clooney taking the mic for some pretty decent Coens karaoke, only to occasionally add in a sort of serious, spoken-word interlude about the burning issue that remains the brothers’ biggest blind spot: race in America.
The melding of the two sensibilities works best in the arch prologue which takes the form of an extended advertisement for the pleasures of 1950s Suburbicon, a model town of identikit homes on neat lawns where the postman knows everyone’s name and everyone’s business. It’s a place, the announcer-voice tells us over Alexandre Desplat’s piping, cheerily parodic score, that is “a melting pot of diversity” in that it features blindingly white families from New York, Ohio and “even Mississippi” smiling apple-pie smiles. But the peacefulness of this picket-fence paradise is troubled when a black woman (Karimah Westbrook) answers the door to the cheery postman and is discovered not to be the maid but the lady of the house. Cue angry town-hall meetings, the hasty erection of a high fence to protect the white gaze from having to fall on black skin, and a gathering mob of increasingly mutinous neighbors. It was presumably too late to digitally insert some tiki torches into the angry mob, but no matter, the Trump-era parallels could not be more overt if this town were actually named Suburbicovfefe.
The gathering storm around the Meyer residence is based on a real event in Levittown, PA that formed the basis of a standalone script Heslov and Clooney were working on when they hit on the notion of combining it with the pre-existing Coens screenplay for “Suburbicon.” And so, here the Meyers are imagined to share a backyard fence with the Lodges, a white family with some very dark habits.
Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) has a young son Nicky (Noah Jupe) and a surly, wheelchair-bound wife Rose (Julianne Moore) whose twin sister Margaret (also Moore, obviously) and brash, overweight brother Mitch (Gary Basaraba) round out the extended family unit. When the Lodges are victims of a home invasion and the overzealous application of chloroform results in Rose’s death, Margaret moves in “because the boy needs a mother” with a haste that is a little unseemly. She even dyes her hair blonde to better resemble her dead sister, or as we Hitchcock fans like to call it, she self-“Vertigo“s. This is all pretty suspicious, not just for audiences familiar with “Fargo” or “Double Indemnity,” but also for little Nicky, and for a smarmy claims investigator enliveningly, and all too briefly, played by Oscar Isaac. The body count ticks upward.
Uneven though it is, the film is peppered with enough cherishable dialogue tics and dummkopf punchlines to make it a enjoyable watch, from Margaret’s self-help mumbo-jumbo to a skewering pen-portrait of masculine inarticulacy around “feelings” to a curious obsession with Aruba’s status as a protectorate. But the problem with the film’s many Coensian elements is that there doesn’t seem to be any better way to render them than they way the brothers themselves might do, or already have. So we have a bellowing fat man silhouetted against fire like in “Barton Fink,” a “Fargo”-esque odd-couple pairing of sinister big man and squirrelly smaller man as the villainous duo, and even the right-on-the-nose cold-cocking of the everyman antihero, of which Clooney himself has been the recipient at the Coens’ hands more than once. This karaoke number is kind of a greatest-hits medley too.
Robert Elswit‘s photography is deliciously rich, though, and everything from the mid-century modernist production design to Jenny Eagan‘s cleverly conformist costumes makes looking at “Surburbicon” a pastel pleasure. And the performances are often delicious, especially from Damon, subverting the same bland decency he played up so recently in Alexander Payne‘s “Downsizing,” almost to the point of total transgression in a terrific dinner-table scene that sadly pulls back from the brink just when you think it’s actually going to go dark-dark. Newcomer Jupe is also a standout: his convincing terror, heartbreak and disillusion at who exactly “loves him like a son,” in the words of goodhearted but blundering uncle Mitch, provides the jerky black comedy with its only real moments of emotional connection.
Moore fares less well as Margaret. Her role is underwritten and vaguely self-contradictory, as she exhorts Nicky to go play with the black kid next door one moment, then silently allows her manager at the supermarket to deny service to his mother the next. But then, she already defined the role of housewife-faced-with-1950s-racial-attitudes much more seriously in Todd Haynes‘ brilliant “Far From Heaven,” and the chief issue with “Suburbicon” is that, away from the escalating mordant hi-jinks of the main plot, it hasn’t actually got that much to say on the matter.
The irony of the chanting, rioting, Confederate-flag toting angry mob surrounding the Meyers’ house, when the corpse-filled pit of depravity that is the Lodges’ cookiecutter home abuts their backyard is unmistakable, and righteously indignant. But it’s also indicative of the film’s bifurcated nature: We never get to know the Meyers, except that they seem nice, and while making your white characters much, much worse people than your black characters is one way to show which side of the moral fence you’re on, it doesn’t amount to much if your film is far more interested in the depraved whites than the long-suffering black family next door. “Suburbicon” has two storylines, the funny one about white people killing each other and the serious one about real-life-inspired black people stoically resisting injustice and they are separate, not equal. [B/B-]
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