Suburbicon

Suburbicon is a peaceful, idyllic suburban community with affordable homes and manicured lawns... the perfect place to start a family and raise children. That's exactly what the Lodge family, consisting of father Gardner (Matt Damon), model wife Rose (Julianne Moore), and son Nicky, is doing in the summer of 1959. But the tranquil surface of the American dream soon gives way to a disturbing reality: husband and father Gardner suddenly has to face the dark side of small-town life and deal with fraud, deception, and violence. This is the (bloody) story of bad people making even worse decisions: Welcome to Suburbicon! The original screenplay, on which George Clooney's sixth film is based, was written by none other than Joel and Ethan Coen – specialists in blackly humorous grotesqueries in the style of “Fargo” or “A Serious Man,” in which narrow-minded petty bourgeoisie fall into (sometimes bloody and violent) downward spirals. Clooney sets the action in the colorful 1950s setting of a bourgeois dream come to life, where women dress up in modest summer dresses and men still work hard in the old tradition. Until the Mayers, a black family, move into town – and the well-behaved, racist model citizens rise up in protest. “The images that cinematographer Robert Elswit (”There Will Be Blood“) finds for this racist escalation are shocking and oppressive, but one of the astonishing twists in ”Suburbicon" is that they are only a subplot to a perfidious plot that takes place in the house next door. The Mayers do not appear in the original screenplay by the Coen brothers, which they wrote in the 1980s and also set there. It was Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov who put their own political stamp on the film with its 1950s setting: drawing a parallel between the open racial hatred of the era idealized by Trump and the current tensions between black and white America. [...] But the film is actually a sinister story about emotional coldness, domestic violence, unscrupulousness behind bourgeois facades, selfishness, and abuse next door in the house of the boring and conventional-looking businessman Gardner Lodge. Clooney has staged this thriller-grotesque precisely and ruthlessly, largely without the Coens' often soothing humor and mannerisms, so that laughter sticks in your throat." (Andreas Borcholte, on: spiegel.de)