Suburbicon (2017)

George Clooney's directorial career is an interesting one, dating back to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in 2002. Within that time he's arguably provided one masterpiece, 2005's sophomore effort Good Night, and Good Luck which resulted in a number of Oscar nominations. Sadly Suburbicon falls well short of those heights, attempting to amalgamate two separate story ideals that are co-written by the Coen brothers. You can tell they're involved; there's the odd sequence that feels like it's been taken from one of their own films and transported into this, but unfortunately that's a rarity.

Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, a seemingly mundane family man who lives in the idyllic setting of sixties Suburbicon, an American dream style town that reminds you of Alexander Payne's Downsizing (2017), but the town is shaken by the arrival of the African-American Mayers family, with racism still prevalent in America.

The other half of the film concerns a home invasion early on in the Lodge's household, which leads to the death of Gardner's paraplegic wife Rose, leaving Gardner to parent his son Nicky on his own, with the help of Rose's identical twin sister Margaret. Both of the sisters are played excellently by Julianne Moore, and Damon is his usual reliable self, but the tone of the film is odd from the opening scenes, and never fully recovers. The problem lies with the writing as the film continues to follow both storylines without ever convincingly combining the two, and even the presence of Oscar Isaac halfway through fails to ignite the film, although he does offer some brief respite from the trudge that Suburbicon becomes by that point.

Suburbicon, perhaps under the full control of the Coen brothers, may have had the promise to become a ballerdian utopian drama, but with the mess of the storytelling it ends up being a disappointingly hollow affair.

4.3/10