Skip to main content

'Suburbicon' is proof that even a great cast and creative team can fall flat

Clooney and the Coens can't save 'Suburbicon' from tripping over its picket fence

suburbicon movie review crp 8
Image used with permission by copyright holder

“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“

Will Matt Damon’s new film live up to the pedigree of its Oscar-winning creative team and cast? Read on for our Suburbicon review.

Possibly the most important thing to know about Suburbicon, the new film directed by George Clooney from a script co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen, is that it is almost certainly not the movie you walk into the theater expecting to see.

Recommended Videos

The sixth film to be directed by Clooney (who has had a film he directed hit theaters every three years since 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), Suburbicon casts Matt Damon as Gardner Lodge, an unassuming company man whose peaceful life in the idyllic community of Suburbicon is thrown into chaos after a deadly home invasion. The film juxtaposes the increasingly more dangerous predicament that Gardner finds himself in over time with the growing unrest in the community caused by the arrival of an African-American family in the lily-white neighborhood.

Part dark comedy, part racial drama, part crime caper, and part social satire, Suburbicon doesn’t shy away from juggling some complicated themes, but the pedigree of the film’s creative team — and its award-winning cast — makes it surprising to see the film go off-course.

Along with the Oscar-winning Coen brothers, the screenplay for Suburbicon is also co-written by Clooney and his frequent collaborator, Grant Heslov (Good Night and Good LuckThe Ides of March). Damon is joined in the cast by Julianne Moore (Still Alice), who plays dual roles as both Rose Lodge (Gardner’s wife) and Margaret, Rose’s sister. Playing supporting roles in the film are Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina) as a clever claims investigator, Jack Conley (L.A. Confidential) as the local police chief, and Noah Jupe (The Night Manager) as Gardner’s young son, as well as Glenn Fleshler (True Detective) and Alex Hassell (Two Down) as a pair of criminals with their sights set on Gardner and his family.

Suburbicon doesn’t shy away from juggling some complicated themes

To be fair, most of the films penned by the Coen brothers veer into unexpected territory — both tonally and narratively — and that’s generally been part of their appeal. FargoNo Country For Old Men, and The Big Lebowski all meandered and occasionally felt like they lost their way, but the winding path they took always felt deliberate in the end.

That’s not the case with Suburbicon, which never feels committed to the story it wants to tell and never musters the sort of performances that justify the confusing, awkward set of half-told stories it does ends up spinning.

Damon’s portrayal of the family’s seemingly emotionless patriarch plays the role for comedy one moment and dramatic tension the next, but feels too tightly wound to deliver satisfyingly on either element. Audiences anticipating a film about a 1950s-era pencil-pusher forced to the brink by the forces conspiring around him (as the marketing for the film suggests) will likely be disappointed by the surprisingly dark, reserved character arc that Damon and the film’s script delivers. There’s little-to-no change in Damon’s character over the course of the film, which is particularly disappointing given his top billing and the focus of the film’s marketing.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Moore, on the other hand, manages to make her character more entertaining than she probably should be, given her poorly developed story and relatively few opportunities to steal the spotlight. Her spin on the ’50s housewife goes all in on the archetype and makes for some entertaining exchanges in the right company — particularly in the scenes she shares with Isaac’s smarmy claims investigator. Their characters ooze with a fantastically entertaining level of insincerity, and it’s a shame those scenes amount to so little of the film.

Jupe also provides a good performance as a child caught up in all of this madness, and essentially serves as the audience’s surrogate in observing the increasingly disturbing events that are causing his family’s life to crumble around him. His perspective adds an additional coming-of-age theme to the already overcrowded film, and it says a lot about Suburbicon that this young actor whose primary direction seems to involve acting acting shell-shocked ends up being the most emotionally relatable character in the film.

Beyond everything going on with Gardner and his family, Suburbicon also — and somewhat half-heartedly — chronicles the otherwise peaceful community’s increasingly violent efforts to rid themselves of the Mayerses, an African-American family who moved into their neighborhood.

The story follows this arc without much conviction, though, and the experience of the new family and the escalating racial aggression they face in this otherwise-idyllic community is frustratingly underdeveloped and under-related to the events unfolding around Gardner, despite the two families sharing a fence. It occasionally feels as if the film’s creative team added the Mayers story as an afterthought, and their scenes were simply pasted in as segues to add dramatic weight that Gardner’s story on its own doesn’t earn.

Given everything the Mayers family endures in the film, the second-class status their story is assigned ends up feeling like a tone-deaf decision on the part of the movie’s creative team, and whatever relationship between the two arcs was intended, it’s simply not executed well enough to justify the two narratives coexisting in the same film.

Despite all of those flaws, Suburbicon is an ambitious film, and to its credit, the intentions of the filmmakers and cast seem to be in the right place. In execution, however, the film falls frustratingly short of doing well by any of the themes it tries to address. Given the pedigrees and impressive accolades of everyone involved in the movie, it’s easy to set the bar high for Suburbicon, but even the creative team’s positive record with eccentric, unpredictable stories isn’t enough to excuse the film’s wide range of shortcomings.

Unfortunately, Suburbicon is a rare miss for an otherwise reliable group of filmmakers and actors.

Rick Marshall
Former Contributing Editor, Entertainment
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
Jurassic World Rebirth review: A fun but all-too familiar blockbuster
Jurassic World Rebirth: a sequel that brings some life back to an exhausted franchise
A man and woman hide in a field and stare curiously in "Jurassic World Rebirth."

Director Gareth Edwards (The Creator) has brought audiences back to the land of dinosaurs with his film, Jurassic World Rebirth. This standalone sequel to Jurassic World Dominion follows a team of hired operatives as they journey to an island inhabited by mutant dinosaurs, which were left behind by Jurassic World researchers, and try to gather enough dino-DNA to generate a cure for heart disease.

The Jurassic Park franchise is struggling to keep things fresh and engaging. Clearly, the filmmakers knew this fact during the production of Jurassic World Rebirth. This sequel falls short of expectations with its familiar story elements, some thin characters, and a clunky script. Nevertheless, Jurassic World Rebirth still provides some entertainment, featuring some terrific new players, exhilarating action scenes, terrifying suspense, and outstanding visuals. This movie is far from the best in the Jurassic Park saga, but it's a decent blockbuster nonetheless.

Read more
This new adventure movie will win the weekend box office. Watch the trailer here
Movie theater audience watching Dolby Cinema content.

Last weekend, F1: The Movie stood atop the box office podium, but this weekend a very different movie will steal the spotlight.

Jurassic World Rebirth is expected to rake in between $80 million and $100 million on its debut weekend in North America, according to a forecast from Boxoffice Pro. Watch the trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth at the top of this page.

Read more
Napoleon Dynamite is one of three underrated HBO Max movies to watch this weekend
Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro stand together.

The movie event of the year is now on HBO Max in Sinners. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack, two outlaws who return to their Mississippi town to run a juke joint. On opening night, the twins are visited by vampires, who plan to add the entire party to their clan.

Sinners put up historic numbers at the box office, and now, audiences everywhere can stream it in the comfort of their own homes. Speaking of streaming, we picked three underrated movies to watch this holiday weekend. One of our picks is a cult classic from 2004.

Read more