In the late fifties, a black family, the Mayers (Karimah Westbrook, Tony Espinosa and Leith Burke), move into the quiet neighbourhood of Suburbicon. The all-white community reacts by trying to force the family out through a constant campaign of harassment.
While this is going on, next door young Nicky Lodge (Noah Jupe) is suspicious that his father Gardner (Matt Damon) and aunt Margaret (Julianne Moore) had his mother murdered…
Finally.
After a couple of movies I can barely remember, George Clooney finally delivers a genuinely memorable movie.
It shares similar qualities with his previous directorial efforts - it combines one idea too many, it thinks it is making a serious point, and it wants all the tones.
In 2017, Suburbicon was a notorious bomb. I remember the critics savaging it, particularly for its portrayal of the black couple. One year into the Trump presidency, I can see why it inspired such vitriol.
I thought The Ides of March was shallow twaddle in its ideas on politics and its drama, and Suburbicon is similarly misguided in its attempt to skewer the ideal of fifties suburbia. In a time when too many (white) people were reckoning with the return of overt white supremacy to the public discourse, the film’s final shrug of an ending is about as effective as a snowball thrown into hell.
Suburbicon is not good.
If I had watched at the time, or if I had not just sat through The Monuments Men, I might have hated it.
But after the meandering nonsense of Clooney’s last directorial effort, in its clash of tones and storylines, Suburbicon is highly watchable.
The film was based on a script by the Coen Brothers that was written in the eighties. Clooney picked up the project and combined it with a script he and Grant Heslov were working on about the Myers, a black family who moved to Levittown in the fifties and faced horrific harassment.
If those two stories clanged in your head, just wait until you watch the movie.
This is a recurring problem with Clooney the filmmaker - he seems to be incapable of focusing on one thing. As with the screwball transformation of Leatherheads, he seems to be striving for something more.
In the case of Suburbicon, the duelling storylines are so separate you can feel Clooney copy and pasting his script in between the Coens. There are some linkages, but you could lift out the Mayers (in the movie) scenes and the Coens’ murder mystery would still work.
In Clooney’s movie, the Mayers are meant to be an idea, the film’s super-obvious attempt to highlight the racism underpinning the the white-focused images associated with the fifties, and juxtapose their plight with their white neighbours, who are engaged in murder and insurance fraud.
The film juxtaposes these storylines in a vague attempt at irony - the Mayers are innocent victims while the community is ignoring the real crimes taking place literally next door.
The most obvious problem is the wide disparity in tone - the Lodge storyline is pure dark comedy, as the clueless adults bumble about, scheming and betraying each other until they are all dead. Meanwhile the Mayers storyline is straight drama, with lashings of horror as their home is laid siege to by a torch-wielding mob.
Are we supposed to laugh at the Lodges? Sure. But it creates whiplash when you cut to Mrs Mayer getting stonewalled while trying to buy groceries.
The murder mystery storyline feels like warmed-over leftovers of a Coen Brothers movie - there are some weird characters and setpieces, but it feels off. Part of the issue may be that the Coens wrote the script in the eighties and never made it. Maybe that should have been a clue.
Even without the Mayers’ subplot, Clooney is not the filmmaker to tackle a Coens’ script.
Suburbicon is slightly better at humour than Leatherheads - it helps that the cast have the tenor of their language and rhythm - but only by a hair.
And the social satire is so clunky and simplistic, in the end you are left wondering what the point of it all was.
The best thing I can say about it is that Noah Jupe is well-cast as young Nicky, and Clooney - a recently married father at the time - seems to be more plugged into the scenes based around his young protagonist’s point of view.
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