Suburbicon is a tepid take on a controversial topic

I did it for the fans. In a week when the biggest film being released was Jigsaw (because we need another Saw film) and when the film that I was looking forward to watching got critically panned (Suburbicon), I thought I’d have to watch Geostorm.

Unfortunately, the pretentious kid in me wouldn’t let me skip a film in which the Coen bothers (Inside Llewyn Davis, No Country for Old Men) were credited as writers.

So I trudged along in the rain to watch Suburbicon, George Clooney’s sixth film as a director. The Coen brothers originally wrote the script for Suburbicon in 1986 after they released Blood Simple (their directorial debut), but it was never pushed into production.

Flash forward to 2005, and it was reported that Clooney would direct in the film.

However, no updates came until 2015, when it was announced that Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Josh Brolin had joined the cast. Then, in May of last year it was announced that Woody Harrelson and Oscar Isaac had also joined the cast.

Unfortunately, Harrelson had to drop out of the project due to scheduling issues (it would have overlapped with filming for Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe). After years of work, Clooney and the rest of the crew began filming that fall. The finished product premiered at the Venice International Film Festival this past September.

Suburbicon follows a mild-mannered father, Gardner Lodge (Damon), trying to face his demons after a break in ends in the death of his wife Rose (Moore). Or at least that’s what the trailers want you to think. The marketing team wants you to believe that Gardner was an innocent bystander in this tragic home invasion, who is now looking for revenge.

Margaret, Rose’s twin sister (also played by Moore), is a pill snorter damaged by the murder of her sister, and Bud Cooper (Isaac) is the head of the mob that took out Rose. The trailer does a fantastic job of selling you the dark humor that’s commonly found in Coen brothers films.

That being said, the film’s subplot-but-not-really is what brings it down. What the trailers fail to show you is that this film is set in the 1950s, right before the peak of the Civil Rights movement, and that Suburbicon is set in an idyllic neighborhood full of white middle-class families. Everything is perfect, until a young African-American family, the Mayers, move in.

This sets off the people in the neighborhood. One of the neighbors can be heard saying something along the lines of “I don’t want them to be oppressed, but...” The community quickly comes to attribute the trouble that Gardner and his family have gotten into to the arrival of their new black neighbors.

As you can probably tell, the two plots don’t really mesh well. The only thing loosely tying them together is the friendship between Gardner’s son and the Mayers’ son. Yet, even so, it feels unnecessary.

It is clear what Clooney was trying to do here. There’s obviously irony in how the cops and the rest of the town are staging a mini-riot in front of the Mayers’ home while the house behind it has all sorts of criminal activity going on — not to mention, a damn fire explosion went off.

While I appreciate this attempt by Clooney to show us how #woke he is, at the end of the day, the film’s message doesn’t land.

It was infuriating to see such disrespect and bigotry portrayed on screen and not even have some sort of payoff, no cathartic moment — nothing.

It would’ve served the movie best not to touch this subject and instead focus more on the classic Coen Brothers and family-crime-comedy elements.

Performance-wise, we have stars who know what to bring to the table. Oscar Isaac, my Guatemalan brother, is one of two standouts here. He does a great job at selling the humorous moments he’s given.

The second standout is Noah Jupe, who plays Nicky, Gardner’s son. We spend a good amount of time with him, watching how his father’s decisions effectively destroy his innocence.

There’s not much else to praise here. The film feels mismatched with two separate plots that are unsatisfactorily woven together and ultimately leave you uninterested in its conclusion.

I would love to see what the Coen Brothers would have done with this. Clooney and co., unfortunately, faltered.