Suburbicon

The advance word on Suburbicon has been downright poisonous, despite its star power and its provenance as a Coen brothers’ script from the 1980s adapted by director/co-writer George Clooney. While I’m not going to argue that this affair is any sort of masterpiece – it’s flawed in some significant ways – I liked this nasty, nihilistic little crime thriller. It sets up a whole bunch of unappetizing people to get their just desserts, and I do find that to be pleasing on a primal level.

Set in the 1950s, the movie opens with little Nicky Lodge (Noah Jupe) being awakened by his father Gardner (Matt Damon), a vice president of a medium-sized firm. Two burglars (Steven M. Porter and Alex Hassell) have broken into their handsomely appointed house, and they proceed to tie up Nicky, his dad, Nicky’s mother Rose, and her identical twin sister Margaret (both played by Julianne Moore). As they’re all being chloroformed, Nicky watches the robbers intentionally give his mother an overdose before he himself goes under. A few days later, with Rose dead and Margaret having moved in, Nicky is puzzled when he spots his mother’s killers in a police lineup, only for his dad and his aunt to insist that they don’t recognize the men. The kid gets to work rigging up a barricade for his bedroom, because he’s smarter than any of the adults in the movie.

Meanwhile, the community’s first African-American family moves into the house next door, and within hours an angry white mob gathers round, staying there for days and resorting to increasingly violent tactics to try to drive the new neighbors out. Yes, underneath this prosperous suburb’s well-manicured surfaces lie festering moral cankers.

This part of the movie is welded onto the Coen Brothers script from one of Clooney’s own planned projects about Levittown, Pennsylvania: The characters are named Meyers (Leith Burke and Karimah Westbrook), similar to the real-life people who integrated Levittown, and the mob violence that erupted when they did is fairly close to what we see in the film.

That historical sidebar is interesting in itself, but it fits uneasily beside the grubby crime in the main storyline, and other movies as varied as Blue Velvet,Hairspray and Far From Heaven have all delved deeper into the rot of mid-century lily-white suburbia.

There’s the problem of combining two movie concepts, but even the main plot itself isn’t handled with much dexterity. Clooney errs with pacing and tone in the first half, and a cop (Jack Conley) drops by and seems to cotton onto Gardner and Margaret’s scheme – only to disappear and never be heard from again. While Clooney does have an affinity for bumbling black comedy (watch his 2002 directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind for further proof), but a thriller like this one, which collapses in on its plotters, works best with a director who can fold all the corners neatly. That’s much more Joel and Ethan Coen than it is George Clooney.

The movie does pick up momentum in the second half, as Gardner and Margaret’s badly planned intrigue starts to come undone. Oscar Isaac smashes into the film for a few delightful minutes as a crooked insurance investigator who can’t stop talking about how smart he is. (He does sniff out the murder conspiracy, sight unseen, so he’s entitled to a boast or two.)

Newcomer Jupe does well, too, with the boy’s silent “Oh crap, I can’t trust any of the grown-ups I live with” vibe. As the body count rises, the ingenuity with which these dimwitted criminals manage to snuff themselves is quite striking.

Though Suburbicon can’t stand next to classics of this subgenre, it does compare favorably with the Coens’ lesser entertainments, ranking ahead of Burn After Reading and The Ladykillers. This is a minor film, probably irredeemably so in spite of its star power, and yet it sent me out of the theater chuckling evilly to myself.

SUBURBICON (3) • Directed by George Clooney • Starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac • Rated R • 104 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Lighthouse Cinemas