Suburbicon *1/2

Director: George Clooney

Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac
Screenplay: Joel & Ethan Coan and George Clooney &Grant Heslov
Rated R (Violence, Language, Sexual Situations
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Release Date: 10/27/2017

Suburbicon is the type of film that makes you ask questions after you exit the theater. The problem is that the questions you are asking are not the ones the producers and director intended. The big one, the one I couldn’t stop asking myself even hours after sitting through it, is ‘What happened?’ Not ‘What happened in the film, although there is plenty of confusion there, too, but what happened behind the scenes to make it turn out like this. There is plenty of talent both in front of the cameras and behind them with every key player on both sides having at least one Academy Award to their name, yet this film comes across as sloppy and poorly executed. ‘What happened?’

Suburbicon is a typical suburban in the mid-fifties, serene, quiet, and white. Problems begin when an African-American family moves in. Immediately the citizens are in an uproar over this. Things escalate quickly and turn violent. There is no real development behind the characters involved. Even the African-American family is nothing more than mere stereotypes with no one in the family given much to do beyond represent a problem with suburban white people in that era. A scene late in the film when the mother is denied the ability to shop at the local grocery store could have been powerful had we been given a real character for her. But this movie doesn’t care enough to develop her or anyone else in her family. This movie is also not really about this. The real story is about Matt Damon, a suburbanite who’s wife, Julianne Moore, is killed by two men during a break-in. To help his young son cope, Damon’s sister-in-law, also played by Julianne Moore, moves in. Like the B-story, things escalate, turning violent as only a film written by the Coen Brothers could.

The twist, if you could really call it that, reveals itself early on and from that point on the film loses much of its momentum. The only thing keeping it from a complete train wreck is the terrific performance by the two leads. Damon and Moore are in fine form here but they are given no real meat to bite into and it makes what they are doing feel like swimming upstream. It’s frustrating seeing these two struggling to make the most of so little material. Oscar Issac shows up about midway through the film for a couple of scenes and steals the movie away. It’s really two bad he’s not in it more as he elevates the film whenever he is on screen.

This is the type of film that could have soared under the direction of the Coen Brothers. It has all the elements of some of their classics, like eccentric background characters and absurd situations. George Clooney doesn’t seem to understand how to make this material work, though. At times it seems like it’s attempting to do comedy, then it seems to forget this and go into bad thriller mode. Then there is the B story which just seems to play in the background as noise before suddenly ending unsatisfactorily. It is a muddled mess that could have been so much more than what it ended up being. With a lesser pedigree this could have been forgiven. With the talent around it it ends up being a head scratcher. Again I ask: ‘What happened?’