Suburbicon is a new attempt by Hollywood to offer the audience something fun and at the same time something that will force them to think. It's undoubtedly that we need more and more every day, but this is served to us daily. The flirt of film and everyday life is as old as the film itself, and many directors devise creative and incredible ways in which, as individuals burdened with life's concerns, they will highlight what are the current problems in society that we should think after leaving the cinema.
So, from the heart of Hollywood, comes George Clooney in the director's chair, who came across the Coen brothers' script and adjusted it with the help of Grant Hessel, and tried to create a satire, comedy and social commentary "3in1", but the muses that he visited during the film, they either did not seem to be high-ranking or they were poorly paid. If Clooney wanted a place in the Oscar race, he missed the stadium. But let's start again.
Suburbicon is a fictitious American city where it's ideal American lives in the 50's are living white Americans in perfect harmony and community. Among them is the Lodge family, made up by Father Gardner (Matt Damon), his wife Rose and her sister Margaret (Juliane Moore) and Nicky (Noah Jupe). The new Mayers family moved just across their house, which became a particularly painful thorn in the eye of the Suburbicone community just because they had an accident to be blacks at the time.
While a city with a sick interest is concerned with the Mayers, which is inspired by a true event, the Lodge family have a real drama. Two robbers fall in to their house one night and they kill Gardner's wife Rose. After his mother's death, Nicky remains to live with her father, who is a classic Coenian-minded protagonist, and ttheir Aunt Margaret arrives "temporarily". It's immediately clear that there is something badly stinking here, and rest of the population of Suburbicon doesn't feel that smell, but is intensively engaged in the expulsion of the alleged black sheep from the community, not giving them a chance to fit in. As it usually happens with Coen Brothers stories, the film is full of plot twists, more or less expected, but since George Clooney has also stamped off his sign on the film, it smells almost like a suburb on canvas.
Unused potential
Suburbicon is adorned with a beautiful scenery and costume design, faithful to the period in which the plot is located and the false idyll that the outlandish suburbans live on. The film adorns both quite solid and almost excellent acting performances of Hollywood choreographed names, given the controversy among the actors. Oscar Isaac is particularly noteworthy as an insurance agent that appears in another, but completely chaotic part of the film, and it's a real refreshment in the story. Isaac extracts from his character the maximum and completely overshadows the dialogues with other characters. He's motivated, mysterious, intelligent and full of electricity missing from other characters.
The biggest damage to this film is that it has great potential, and a small percentage of this potential has actually been achieved. There are two major problems; The first problem is the script that seems to be dealing with two narrative lines about the two families Lodge and Mayers who share the courtyard fence. These narrative lines are completely unrelated, except for friendships between two boys who don't care about the idiocy of an adult world, and the Mayers are completely marginalized. Because of this, the film is chaotic and the story is superficial, and twists are ridiculous, while they should be innovative and entertaining, which is otherwise the case in the Coen brothers' scripts (which no one touches). The script also lacks eloquent dialogues, motivation and character development, and some general control over the story.
The tone in tone is another problem; At the same time, Clooney wanted to create a satire, black comedy and comment on social inequalities, but he scattered so many sides that he failed in either of these three things. Mayerse does not represent the audience much deeper, and Lords, to which they are more concentrated, are not strong enough to lead the film successfully, which is especially noticeable when stolen by a collateral agent of the insurance agent.
Who dares, wins
If Clooney had only sticked to one story, the film might have turned out differently. This just seems like he copied the Coen Brothers, and that's hardly enough for a score. The chaos in which characters end up, as another known feature of the Coen brothers movies, isn't well integrated and the whole story is in a bigger chaos than it should've been.
The announcement of the film seems to be more comprehensive and better performed than the film itself, which is a real disadvantage, because the potential of the story is just there. The film could go in so many directions and take advantage of the features it has, but Hollywood seems to continue it's trend of bad attempts to create good films.
This is my translation from Croatian to English from Ziher hr article ''Nered u predgrađu, nered na platnu'' by I.Kolar