Suburbicon
George Clooney (2017)
The saddest thing about Suburbicon is that George Clooney, from what he’s said in interviews, really believes that he’s made a cogent social satire, fortified by political anger. The hybrid screenplay derives from a script written by Joel and Ethan Coen thirty years ago, onto which Clooney and his regular writing and producing partner Grant Heslov have grafted a racial drama, based on real-life events. Joel Silver, one of the film’s producers along with Clooney and Heslov, has said that the Coen brothers’ original, which pokes (fun at) the rotten underbelly of middle-class American suburban life in the Eisenhower era, dates from 1986. That year also saw the release of David Lynch’s similarly themed and masterly Blue Velvet – a main reason, perhaps, why the Coens’ script gathered dust for so long. The historical inspiration for the straight-faced political dimension of Suburbicon is the reaction of the white residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1957, to a black family who moved into the neighbourhood. George Clooney is oblivious to how badly this aspect clashes with the Coens’ black comedy.
Levittown, PA was the second of seven large suburban housing developments by Levitt & Sons, built in the twenty-five years following the end of World War II and intended, at least in the first instance, to accommodate returning veterans and their families: the first Levittown development was in New York in 1947, the last in Maryland in 1970. Clooney’s film, set in 1959, starts with an amusing mock commercial for its post-war new town setting. The advert enthuses about how the place has grown and thrived in the twelve years since it started life, concluding that ‘The only thing missing in Suburbicon is you!’ Unlike the Levittowns (or Lumberton, North Carolina, the location of Blue Velvet), Suburbicon’s very name is improbably symbolic and predicts satirical treatment. What’s surprising – and baffling – about Clooney’s approach is that he dramatises the racial prejudice thread so quickly, and in a relatively realistic style, that he renders otiose the sardonic dismantling of the suburban idyll, which occupies most of the film that follows. The locals hold public demonstrations against the African-American family – Mr and Mrs Mayers (Leith Burke and Karimah Westbrook) and their young son Andy (Tony Espinosa) – living among them. In other words, the established denizens of Suburbicon are such vicious racists that the macabre goings-on within the home of the protagonist Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) are a secondary issue. Or should be: it’s unfortunate that Clooney deals with the Mayerses’ plight so perfunctorily, compared with the Lodge family’s, that Suburbicon itself becomes an unwitting illustration of a sort of racial discrimination.
The two parts of the story intersect in only the crudest ways and at the end of the film. The morning after the climactic race riot is also the morning after the mayhem that kills off all the major characters except Gardner’s son Nicky (Noah Jupe). When the media descend on the area, a resident, informed by a journalist what’s occurred in and around the Lodges’ place, complains to her interviewer that this sort of thing didn’t happen when the neighbourhood was all white. Early on, there are a few moments of interracial amity between Nicky Lodge and Andy Mayers. It’s no surprise there’s another in Suburbicon’s last sequence. In the film’s closing shot, the camera pulls away from and far above the white boy and the black boy, the only figures in the landscape of green lawns, throwing a ball to and fro. This image of a future generation in racial harmony – across the picket fence dividing the gardens – is ambiguous. Is it meant as a bitterly ironic comment on Trump’s America or to be taken at sentimental face value? It comes across, one way or another, as a cheap shot.
Gardner Lodge has a white-collar job and a nice home, a beautiful wife Rose (Julianne Moore), an appealing son. The only thing detracting from domestic bliss is that Rose is wheelchair-bound but her twin sister Margaret (also Moore) is on hand to help. The happy family life is not, of course, what it seems; another puzzle of Suburbicon is how soon what lies beneath is exposed. With Matt Damon in the role of Gardner, George Clooney is well equipped to deceive the audience for a while but Damon is given no chance to engage us before revealing his character’s darker side. Our first sight of Gardner comes when he anxiously enters Nicky’s bedroom, in the middle of the night, to tell his son there are men in the house. These two intruders (Glenn Fleshler and Michael Cohen) tie up the whole family and administer to Rose what turns out to be a fatal dose of chloroform. Matt Damon, wearing spectacles that give him a shifty look and create distance between him and the viewer, makes Gardner, in the ensuing scenes, either edgy or pompous, even before we learn that the man owes money to a local crime syndicate – debts that now include a fee for eliminating his wife. Damon’s acting, as usual, is conscientious. He gives a melancholy, almost tragic heft to Gardner’s final speech to his son. For the most part, though, the possibilities implicit in his casting are wasted: there’s not enough distinction between Gardner’s outer and inner selves and little entertainment to be had from Damon’s performance.
Margaret promptly transforms herself into her late sister, dyeing her hair Rose’s colour and sharing Gardner’s bed. Where Matt Damon is cast against type, Julianne Moore is an obvious choice in a story contrasting the flawless surfaces and unwholesome innards of comfortable 1950s American suburbia: she has already, and too memorably for the good of Clooney’s film, embodied this tension in Far from Heaven (2002). Yet Moore seems miscast too, at least to the extent that the script sporadically makes Margaret a dimwit. I was glad that Nicky got out of the film alive, if only because Noah Jupe works hard and well, though plenty of what he’s required to do is unpleasant stuff for a child actor. Jack Conley is good as a police detective leading enquiries into the apparent break-in at the Lodges’ home, until he simply vanishes from the scene. Suburbicon really livens up, though, only with Oscar Isaac’s appearance as Bud Cooper, an insurance claims investigator, who revels in the awkward questions he turns up to ask about the life insurance claim made by Gardner following Rose’s death:
Cooper: When you’ve been in this business as long as I have you develop a nose for hanky-panky – it’s got that faint aroma … but this case here does not have that aroma.
Margaret: Oh, thank goodness for that.
Cooper: No. This one stinks.
Isaac plays Cooper with incisive, enjoyable verve: as in Ex Machina, he shows a real flair for portraying a decidedly dubious and charismatic character. It’s a pity he’s on screen so briefly in Suburbicon. Bud Cooper – in terms of what his plot functions initially seems to be and his eventual fate – has a kind of kinship with Martin Balsam’s Arbogast in Psycho. One section of Alexandre Desplat’s score echoes Bernard Herrmann’s music for the Hitchcock classic too. Desplat’s music tries gamely throughout to keep up with the mood of Suburbicon. George Clooney’s clumsy, confused narrative renders this a thankless task.
24 November 2017