Illustration by Leo Gordon
There’s a small town filled with friendly families, whose kids all play baseball together on the weekends, and they all live in identical white houses. This is the world of Suburbicon.
Suburbicon is the newest film from director George Clooney and writers Joel and Ethan Coen. It follows the lives of two families living in the utopian town of Suburbicon. One is a black family who just moved in and face racial tensions in a previously all white community. The other family is dealing with the heartache after two men break in and kill the matriarch. These two subplots aren’t directly related, but run parallel to each other. The racial plot feels like an afterthought, and its inclusion takes away from the other more prominent story.
This movie is pretty enjoyable, but for all the good there is still a lot of bad.
To start, much of the acting was done very well. Noah Jupe is phenomenal as Nicky, a child who has lost his mother and is dealing with his new family life. Jupe delivers lines well, and all his suspicions throughout the movie feel authentic. Even though he’s a young actor, I found myself enjoying him more than some of his much more experienced costars.
Another fantastic actor was Oscar Isaac who played an insurance investigator. His character has a wide variety of emotions that are all incredibly realistic. He speaks his lines in a way that keeps the viewer heavily invested. Although the dialogue in this whole movie is quite boring and cliché, Isaac brings an energy to his performance that makes his character a huge standout.
While there were standouts like Jupe and Isaac, there were also some actors that failed to deliver. One of the prime examples was Matt Damon, who played the leading role as the house patriarch Gardner Lodge. His dialogue was very boring, but like Issac, Damon had a lot of potential to make it interesting with his performance. Instead he felt bland, like any person could play the same role and do just as well.
Another issue with the film was its heavy reliance on cliché. It seemed that most of the movie was intentionally clichéd to obtain a certain feel, but it wasn’t successful. Suburbicon took many of the tired tropes that have been used thousands of times before, and tried to mesh them together. Some of those tropes worked, like the mob characters played by Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell, who seemed similar to characters from any other crime movie, but in this case stood out due to performance. Other tropes, like the attempt at a social commentary using a racial subplot, failed to provide stimulating or entertaining content.
That was the main problem, the use of clichés with no added content. Even the most successful movies often rely on a couple clichés, but maintain focus on original ideas. Suburbicon had little to no original content, and what little there was failed to outweigh the mountain of clichés that plagued the plot. While there were some variations on the clichés, none of them stood out enough. On top of that, the script tried to merge them together and make them play off of each other, which just made them seem worse.
This lead to very predictable twists in the plot that somehow were surprisingly over the top, an addition that didn’t fit with the rest of the tone of the movie. The movie had little buildup, then out of nowhere it was extremely violent. Nothing meshed together properly.
Besides the good acting, another thing that made up for many of the failures was the setting. Despite being cliché, it was at least beautifully done. All the shops and houses felt straight out of the 50s and it immersed the audience very well. Everything felt incredibly average, as if it could be any place in America, yet it stood out in this same way. The fact that the set designers could create a world that was so stunningly average and realistic was amazing. Without this backdrop of the peaceful suburbs, the rest of the movie would have bogged it down too much and made the film practically unbearable to watch.
The movie had a good setting, and executed some of the clichés well, but ended up failing due to a boring script and lack of cohesion throughout the movie as a whole. While its a fun movie to watch, it’s just not worth seeing in theaters. Watch it when it comes to on demand or streaming platforms. That way if it isn’t your cup of tea, you can just turn it off without wasting too much money.