Suburbicon (2017)
(In French, On TV, May 2020) The biggest disappointment of Suburbicon is that it features a few things I do like—Matt Damon as a despicable character, suburban satire, George Clooney directing, righteous anti-racism, a Coen Brothers script, dark comedy, Julianne Moore, film noir plotting, and Oscar Isaac—yet still mushes them up into this unsatisfying jumble. It doesn’t take a long time for the film’s audience to start sending distress signals—an opening sequence about suburban racism falls flat so quickly that it portends the film’s inability to bring something interesting to the table, and that the quasi-farcical treatment will not help. The rest of Suburbicon struggles to reach solid ground, as anything interesting is undermined by something worse—the overall tone is so absurdly mean-spirited that the wholesale slaughter of characters at the end of the story isn’t quite as meaningful as it could have been. If, watching the film, you detect a clash of sensibilities at work, don’t necessarily blame the differences between the Coens as screenwriters and Clooney as director—read up on the film’s production history and realize that they ended up combining two very different screenplays in the final script. In the end, the film’s two directions aren’t reconcilable: Sure, you can darkly joke about a suburban murder plot, but you can’t really laugh at a black family being the target of community-organized racism. I suppose that my own perspective as a perpetual suburbanite may be an issue here: I’ve experienced the reality long enough that I’m not happy with cheap shots and I demand something more interesting… and Suburbicon’s middle-of-the-road, confused treatment isn’t enough. What a waste. But Oscar Isaac’s two scenes are pretty good.