An abysmal disaster met with both critic’s vituperation and audience’s cold shoulder, George Clooney’s sixth directorial outing SUBURBICON dusts off an 80s Coen Brothers’ script from the closet, andinopportunely interleaves a problematic byplay of a racist hoopla into its main story.
Shrouded with sun-drenched snugness of the 50s, Suburbicon is an American town promulgating a gentrified lifestyle for white folks only, until an ebony-skinned family moves in, all hell will break loose down the line, not to the Mayers (since it turns out they are just the foil in the story-line), but to their neighbor in vicinity, the Lodges, a nuclear family of three, Gardner (Damon), Rose (Moore) and their young son Nicky (Jupe).
A home-intrusion rubs out the paraplegic Rose, but the last glimpse from a chloroformed Nicky flags up some iffy goings-on, Rose’s twin sister Margaret (Moore) moves in as his surrogate mother, but a police-lineup fiasco shatters Nicky to the core, until an insurance fraud surfaces up and everything goes awry, tinted with Coen Brothers-esque morbid humor, immoral undertone and a ratcheting-up body count, only a prelapsarian soul can come through the fire-and-brimstone unscathed.
Matt Damon subverts his usual goody-goody confidence with an ordinary-looking, average-sized host of vice as the sullen father figure who just cannot catch a break ever since embarking on the murderous plan. Julianne Moore, takes on the mission of duality with niceties and calculation, as Rose, she effectually brings about the matrimonial rancor during the short stretch when she is alive and kickingwhereas as Margaret, an obverse of her iconic tour-de-force in Todd Haynes’FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), she comes off as innocuously lethal and crassly conceited. Taken the narrative from achild’s eye-view as much as it can, the film also boosts a terrific performance from Noah Jupe (a co-lead in my book), sympathetically staying in character when the squalor of grown-up’s world is disintegrating around him. Lastly but definitely not the least, Oscar Isaac ripsnortingly steals the spotlight in his turn as a grasping but beguiling insurance agent, who lets vanity get into his head and becomes too blind to understand the gnarly situation.
As I mentioned before, SUBURBICON feels like an anachronistic piece of work, if Coen Brothers had made it the follow-up of their breakthrough debut BLOOD SIMPLE. (1984), the outcome would be very different, and amongst others (such as the tonal discrepancy between Clooney’s artistic temperament and the source material’s knowing wickedness), the biggest rub of Clooney’s picture is the appendage of the African-American family, other than sending up the irony of its “quiet vs. riotous” parallelism and a schematic bond between the two kids, it is discrete, rudimentary, even retrograde, glaringly ill at ease as a wasted opportunity to chime in with today’s ethos.
referential points: Clooney’s CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (2002, 6.3/10), THE IDES OF MARCH (2011, 6.1/10), THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014, 4.4/10); Coen Brothers’ BLOOD SIMPLE. (1984, 8.1/10).
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