Suburbicon: something rotten in Suburbia

Most film reviewers are panning film star George Clooney’s sixth foray into directing. They’re wrong. Suburbicon is enjoyable entertainment and an indictment of the stupidity of racism.

Film star and coffee salesman George Clooney is not a great film director. Monuments Men and Leatherheads were mediocre films. But he is not deterred and both Good Night, and Good Luck. and The Ides of March were of much superior quality. Suburbicon is somewhere in between. Presumably, the reason why so many film reviewers have criticized Clooney is that he has strayed into Joel & Ethan Coen’s terrain and he is, indisputably, unable to match his friends and mentors. But look around. You could see far worse films than Suburbicon.

Clooney and his regular producer Grant Heslov added a subplot about racism to an unfilmed script that the Coen brothers wrote thirty years ago, and the addition has resulted in a slightly schizophrenic chimera of a film. It is set in the kind of suburban neighbourhood that white, bourgeois Americans loved in the 1950s. The attempt to keep up with the Joneses and feigned happiness are unmasked when the first black family moves in. In the worst Trumpian way, the newcomers are bullied out of the neighbourhood. The commotion distracts everyone from the drama that is unfolding at Matt Damon’s house. He plays an ordinary Joe with an extraordinary plan to replace his disabled wife with her twin sister (a double role for Julianne Moore) and to defraud his insurance company in the process. It is difficult not to be reminded of Fargo and Suburbicon doesn’t come out of the comparison well. The Coen brothers served us real coffee from the best beans, while Clooney is touting Nespresso. But that is no reason to revile him. This film has an amazing cast, the reconstruction of 1959 is astonishingly good, the violence is entertaining, the cynical satire bites, and though the Hitchcockian film noir pastiche wobbles, it doesn’t collapse. What else?

> Suburbicon, US, dir.: George Clooney, act.: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac