REVIEW: Suburbicon
Raves
Rants
Suburbicon, George Clooney’s mystery-thriller film set in the 1950’s, left us with a really heavy feeling after watching the film. Based on an old screenplay by the Coen brothers , it was written in the 1980s, and rewritten by Clooney. The film cuts between two disconnected storylines within a secluded suburban community following an eccentric […]
Suburbicon, George Clooney’s mystery-thriller film set in the 1950’s, left us with a really heavy feeling after watching the film. Based on an old screenplay by the Coen brothers , it was written in the 1980s, and rewritten by Clooney.
The film cuts between two disconnected storylines within a secluded suburban community following an eccentric life-insurance scam story of the bland salaryman Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) and wife’s twin sister Margaret (Julianne Moore) and his accomplice and the Mayers, an African American family who recently moved into the neighborhood and has been targeted by white supremists. Sadly, the two families’ storylines never intertwined in the movie. I was kind of expecting the two families’ paths would’ve crossed somewhere in between the movie and give some sort of parallelism, but it never happened.
The plot-points were rather choppy and needlessly confusing with the pacing, I think the story structure was just plain bad despite the excellent and stunning set design, and amazing performances by Matt Damon, Oscar Isaac, and others.
All in all, Suburbicon is a rather disjointed attempt to be a stylized Coen-esque movie with a social advocacy, which in the end cuts both aspects of the film short. Had it focus on only the stylized plot and setting of the film without the social commentary and developed it further, it could’ve been compared to Fargo (1995) in 1950’s utopian glitz, in a good way.
Kimberly Mas
