George Clooney elevates this Coen brothers script into rarefied territory. Vintage, dry humor at its absolute best. And a serious poetic commentary on contemporary American culture as well. Pure genius.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Suburbicon is a finely crafted Coen brothers comedy wrapped up in a George Clooney caricaturesque 1950's period film that weaves together two distinct plot-lines to produce something of real poetic significance. As for the humor, its origins lie clearly with the brothers, but it is aged ever so slightly more into something marked by Clooney's own comedic career into a type of absurdist comedy that, once it finally takes form (and this is probably the failing of the film with the general audience, that it takes some time for the context to establish what exactly the film is) one will find themselves amazed at what they are witnessing. The comedy is so subtle, so totally dry in delivery, so perfectly honed to pitch and tone perfect by the actors, particularly Damon, that one may find that they are the only one laughing out loud in the cinema at something that could clearly be viewed as purely serious. One will even question themselves: is there even something funny going on here? To which the senses, more attuned than the brain, will insist. The humor is there, but it is so delightfully undetectable that it seems to have been designed for only the most refined comedic palate¹. It is, without overstating it at all, pure genius. And the film culminates in what has got to be one of the funniest, driest, most perfectly prepared comedic scenes in the whole of the Coen brothers cinema and maybe even in the whole of cinema.

More than the comedy though, it is the pleasure of watching a 1950's period film, with a kind of laser focus on detail that evokes a Wes Anderson film. The coffee pots, the television, the machines outside the supermarket for children to ride, the huge shiny cars, the television programs and the flashlight remote control, the bicycle. Every detail is there meticulously in place in amplified memory form to recreate the whole experience of its time. This is not a flat documentary-style realistic recreation of its time; rather, Clooney chooses to populate his world with characters that, through their exaggerated, caricatured personalities evoke the substance of the type of American culture that once existed at that time. These are characters that, like in a Western, are so idiosyncratic that they could only have emerged from out of the vast expanse, affluence and hegemonic gravity of America of the 1950s, where each person had the space and material affluence to create their own life on their own terms in their own corner of suburbia from which a slightly psychotic, sociopathic persona could arise. Like the characters of Fargo or any other Coen film, these are people whose narrow focus in life has blinded them to the reality of the things they have gotten themselves involved in. Only here, rather than a present day Minnesotan talking average Joe, we have hyper stylized Golden Age of Hollywood type characters that clearly bear the mark of Clooney himself who, without trying, seems to exude from his skin the essence of that period so that it is no wonder he so masterfully pulls off the serious achievement of both properly tuning the caricatures to not be too exaggerated, but also to properly mobilize them to the service of the absolutely razor thin slice of comedic ephemera he is aiming for. This is the skill and vision, talent and simple knowledge and belonging that only a person like Clooney could bring to film.

Finally, the film is not only a comedy, not only a period piece, but it is also a serious poetic statement on contemporary American culture and its move to the fascist right with Donald Trump and the rise again of xenophobia and racism as scapegoats for the economic decline of white middle class America. In this film, it is the moving into the neighborhood of a black family that precipitates a whole series of events in the suburban community that, in many senses, runs in parallel to the main plot-line of the film. However, rather than being an isolated narrative (as most other reviewers have pointed out), this narrative returns to the foreground in the end, when the scheming of the suburbanites falls to pieces and they are left with no alternative but to jump onto the neighborhood bandwagon to blame the black neighbors and try to scapegoat them in order to clear a way for themselves out of their predicament through slander. And as the comedy of the final masterful comedic scene recedes it is replaced with the heartfelt and poignant message that it is up to the next generation to overcome the scheming bigoted mentality of the previous, who have seemingly no shame and will stop at nothing to avoid taking responsibility for their own inadequacies and bungled failures. What we see in the seriousness of the film, that is clearly visible beneath the subtle and almost undetectable humor, is an American culture without scruples, ignorant of its own vicious intentions, selfish and craven for money and freedom from the difficulties of the life they are faced with—it is a culture without self-awareness, not only then, in the cliched self-indulgent suburbanite of the 1950's, but today, in the hopeless vacuum of the neoliberal economy.

Footnotes