28% on Rotten Tomatoes. 1.5/4 on the Roger Ebert website. And a box office gross of $10 million following a $25 million budget. This Film was made out to be the most offensive thing since Casey Affleck won Best Actor post-sexual assault accusations. Naturally, I had to see it. And what was the result of my viewing? An underwhelming, confused shoulder-shrug of a movie. It suffers from the same affliction that Stephen King's Dreamcatcher did; trying to combine two movies with two very different commentaries into one. I spent the day after watching this film trying to decipher what message they were trying to get across. Every moment where I thought “Maybe this is what they meant…” was followed by a “But wait, that couldn’t work because…” moment. For all my attempts to put the puzzle together, I am mostly bummed that the entire project was not worse; it might have at least been more memorable if it were worse.
As I said, Suburbicon is more confusing than interesting and I think it is safe to blame that on the writing. It was a Coen Brothers script, then given to George Clooney to rewrite and direct. This should have stayed a Coen Brothers project; at least it would have stayed focused, if not odd, for the right reasons. I could be reading into the parallel events or the subtle visual cues indicating that shit is about to go down, or even wondering who the characters remind me of in my personal life. The only questions popping up in my head were ones the film should have answered for me. Was the film trying to be a suburban Blazing Saddles? That could have been funny especially from a Coen Brother script. Was the film trying to add irony to the situation that the disasters of the neighborhood are caused by white suburbanites when the blame is unjustly pushed upon the black family? If so, why did the black family barely play a role in the movie aside from some kind of symbolic gesture of growing home tension for the Matt Damon and Julianne Moore characters? Was it supposed to be a dark comedy (no politically incorrect pun intended) about a 1950’s suburban family, no commentary on race relations, and their disintegrating family? I don’t know, and I don’t think the film knew either.
That is probably the most important thing a film can build for itself, an identity. We remember Fargo because of its clear identity as a suspense film with a comedic edge; we remember Inside Llewyn Davis because it was a day in the life of a starving musician of the 1960’s folk era. Suburbicon has no identity outside of aimlessly eccentric characters inside a 1950’s ad for suburbia. I can barely tell you anything outside of that except there was a lot of violence. If the film were trying to be offensive like Rob Reiner’s North, I could at least give it credit for being memorable. But when a film tries to throw every twist, every stop, every thing it can at you and leaves little to no impression, that is probably the biggest sin of them all. At least to me.
Once again, Suburbicon is a film that stirred up unwarranted controversy. It should have at least been memorably bad, but it was unmemorable and kind of dull. I’m glad I finally satiated my rebellious curiosity for it, but I’d say it is far from worth the effort of seeing let alone getting worked up over. Poor Coen Brothers.
