Scenes are alluring on their own but when clustered as a narrative whole it fails to deliver what it should have.
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Scripted by Joel and Ethan Coen along with a second team of George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Suburbicon has traits and signatures of the Coen brothers but concludes as a different film under Clooney’s direction.
There are good scenes by Clooney that are enjoyable, such as an early scene where two men enters the Lodge residence one night and gathers the family at the dining table. It has palpable tension as the audience gets intrigued by the mystery and implied adversity that looms. This reminds one of the opening scene of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds where Christoph Waltz’s Colonel Hans Landa interviews Monsieur LaPadite.
What is enjoyable in Suburbicon are the characters and the individual scenes that are devised. The crude humour and satire are at times entertaining to watch. However, the film attempts to address too many themes and subgenres that eventually became the lead cause of the demise of Suburbicon.
Suburbicon is a suburban American neighbourhood set in the mid-1900s that appeals to families of diversity to settle. It is however not the cause when an African American family moves into Suburbicon - what appears to be a Caucasian community.
While Clooney briefly flashes developments of this racial plot thread via scenes of an agitated community town hall meeting and neighbourhood harassment that starts off as passive and became aggressive. It is strange that this later became an underlying backdrop to the Lodge family.
Gartner Lodge (Matt Damon) and his wife Rose (Julianne Moore) and son Nicky (Noah Jupe) felt like a persecuted family with tragedies bestowed upon them one after another. This began with the earlier mentioned scene of night burglary, followed by the demise of Rose. There was suspicion by the audience that it arose from Nicky’s first approach to befriend their African-American neighbours.
Everyone knows that it is never that simple.
As what is expected of the Coen brothers, the side characters are interesting to watch as they are quirky and larger than life. The lead character also became the one that ends up finding himself drowning in a pool of misery that he created. There are certain connotations of how the Lodge may be compared with the African-American family, but it is not obvious and hence it becomes confusing for the audience to understand what the film seeks to achieve.
Suburbicon is just like the neighbourhood that it portrays where each family is fine but fails as a neighbourhood and community. Scenes are alluring on their own but when clustered as a narrative whole it fails to deliver what it should have.
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