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After his mother is killed in a home invasion, a young boy (Noah Jupe) begins to suspect his father (Matt Damon) and aunt (Julianne Moore) staged the event — and that his life is now in danger, too. He tries to solicit help from a sympathetic uncle while Damon and Moore entangle with a suspicious insurance agent and a couple of gangsters. All of this happens against the backdrop of 1950s suburban racism, with the citizenry all focused on running the neighborhood’s first black family out of town, completely unaware of the horrors unfolding in the white household right next door.
Directed by George Clooney and based on a long-buried script by Joel and Ethan Coen (Raising Arizona, Blood Simple), Suburbicon is a bold film that tries too hard to merge disparate storylines and never finds the right tone. The idea of a boy discovering his guardians are evil and want to kill him is a delightfully sinister one that harkens back to both Hitchcockian thrillers and Grimm’s fairy tales. The film is styled, in production design, costume, and score, to amplify these dark genre qualities. Some of the actors also fall in line with this reading, including Moore as the selfish aunt character straight out of ‘Hansel & Gretel’, and Oscar Isaac as the oily and manipulative insurance agent.
What ruins the film is the ponderously serious side-story to which Clooney gives far too much attention. The neighborhood racism angle simply does not fit. It’s not funny. It’s not supposed to be funny. So why is it here, dragging down what could otherwise have been a great dark comedy/horror film? The two competing storylines hinder each other — the comedy/horror one disrespects the dramatic one, and the dramatic one keeps the comedy/horror one from soaring. Matt Damon does not help matters with his overly-serious performance. If he had followed Moore’s and Isaac’s leads, and if Clooney had excised the preachy racism angle, Suburbicon could have been a strange and wonderful film.
With Gary Basaraba, Glenn Fleshler, and Alex Hassell.