Directed by: George Clooney
Starring: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Noah Jupe, Oscar Isaac
Rated R, 105 minutes
About halfway through “Suburbicon,” two characters have a telling conversation about coincidences. They don’t really happen, one character says; what we often think of as coincidence is usually just intention that hasn’t come to light yet. The other character, hiding an act of insurance fraud, tentatively agrees.
In a way, this conversation reveals exactly what is wrong with “Suburbicon,” which was co-written by the Coen brothers (of “Fargo” fame) but helmed by George Clooney (“The Ides of March”), a director whose earnestness pairs poorly with the Coens’ moral abandon. In this brief scene, which is otherwise unremarkable, Clooney exposes himself as a far less idiosyncratic director than the Coens, and therefore a far less interesting one. Whereas the Coens sprinkle coincidence into their movie plots like salt, “Suburbicon” unfolds without flavor, without surprise, and, most criminally, without substance.
That’s not to say Clooney doesn’t try to imbue the movie with capital-M Meaning. Set over a tense backdrop of mid-century racial integration, the movie takes place in Suburbicon, a pristine suburban town that could be Anywhere, USA. The horrors start early. When young Nicky Lodge (Noah Jupe, “The Night Manager”) befriends a new neighbor who happens to be black, chaos ensues in the form of two goons who break into Nicky’s house and murder his mother in front of him, his father, Gardner (Matt Damon, “The Martian”), and his mother’s twin sister, Maggie (Julianne Moore, “Still Alice”). Cue a Greek chorus of neighbors: Nothing like this ever happened before those blacks moved to town!
From there, the story turns into a darkly comic thriller, with Nicky playing straight man to Gardner and Maggie as they cover up the tracks of a scheme gone awry. But when an insurance claim investigator, Cooper (Oscar Isaac, “Inside Llewyn Davis”), comes a-snooping, the whole thing gets blown wide open, and, true to a Coen brothers script, the body count begins to rise in haste.
Meanwhile, next door, a growing crowd of angry suburbanites hounds and harasses the black family, who have so rudely disrupted Suburbicon’s homogeneous calm. This juxtaposition between the two forms of havoc in the neighboring households is where “Suburbicon” tries to take its stand. What fools, Clooney moans, are those self-absorbed white Americans who fight such petty battles among themselves but don’t realize how others suffer abuse just for being who they are; how stupid it is that some people blame their every complaint on those who are different from themselves.
Unfortunately, this exposé of the skeletons in America’s closet is nowhere near as clever as Clooney believes it is. The movie is burdened with a script that feels like an early draft of “Fargo,” before the humor or startling oddities were added, while the performances are as affecting as reheated meatloaf. In its latter half, the movie also concerns itself with the fragility of life, but misses the landing and instead makes death into a mild and inconsequential event; we’re here one minute and gone the next, each of us as unique and important as a peanut butter sandwich.
Clooney paces the scenes well, so at least “Suburbicon” is watchable, even entertaining, but his attempt to wrestle with topics like race relations is underdeveloped and his conclusions muddled. Consider the final image of the film, a game of catch between Nicky and his neighbor; the difference now, though, is that they’re playing in the privacy of their backyards, rather than in public. Clooney treats the scene as a happily-ever-after conclusion to the insanity in both boys’ houses, but inadvertently suggests that the only way to be happy is to appease the mob and keep your transgressions against the status quo private.
Lacking the clarity it needs, “Suburbicon” fails as satire and succeeds only in fits as a thriller. Rather than a focused examination of American prejudice and greed, it’s a jumbled jigsaw puzzle of a movie that tries to sell its inconsistency as intentional. If I’m being generous, the movie’s offensive predictability is appropriate as a commentary on America’s predictably offensive follies of late. So the shoe fits, I suppose, but at the end of the day, a bland movie, no matter how apt its blandness might be, is still just a bland movie.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 11/3/17.