Movie Review: "Suburbicon" (2017)

In July, I decided to start either watching new films I had never seen or re-watching films I had seen - this re-watching was mainly to engage with the film in order to write about it. Now, I have a list of films I have seen from each year since about 2008. But, I do not have anything else - no opinions, no ratings, nothing. So, I chose a film at random to start this series and it is a film that I once watched back only a year after it came out: Suburbicon (2017).

I re-watched this movie in July and ever since then I have been mulling over exactly what I thought about it. I do not remember exactly what I thought the first time I watched it except for the fact that I was not overly invested. I adore the genre of the southern gothic, but I am not sure about what I felt regarding Clooney's directing style. When I watched it a second time recently and read the credits, remembering it was directed by Clooney, I had a sudden moment of sighing - oh, that's why it's falling a little short.

Suburbicon (2017) is a dark comedy about an act of insurance fraud where a man's wife dies and he tries to collect on the life insurance. Long story short, everything goes to s*** very quickly. With strong performances by Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac - this southern gothic presents itself as the ultimate act of revenge against right-wing nationalism whilst at the same time being a tragicomedy about fraud.

The movie in some respects reminded me of The Birds (1963) in its design. The houses are all middle class, the whole scenery looks relatively normal before the big problem begins to unfold. But even as the problem is unfolding, there are no inklings on the outside that anything could be going majorly wrong. This was a feature of the film that I enjoyed.

Julianne Moore's performance was probably my favourite mainly because she fits the role of this woman very well. I do not want to say too much about what happens out of fear I might spoil the story, but the descent in her character is better than any other actor or actress could achieve in that film. This is another feature of the film I enjoyed.

One thing I do not think I enjoyed that much is that though it had clearly been written by the Coen Brothers, you could almost tell that the jokes were written by Clooney. I do not have anything that much against Clooney as he is the star of my favourite animated film - but for him to write the jokes made the writing seem a little bit disjointed. There were too many different script writing styles going on here and it all got a bit jumbled up in the end. Some of the characters did not match the speech patterns of the other characters in the movie even though they were supposed to be the same kind of character (if you watch the film, you might figure out what I mean by 'type'). Be that as it may, the one thing I thought was a bit over the top about the storyline is the fact that the writing basically revealed everything that was going to happen before it did. I do not know whether that was intentional but the Oscar Isaac and Julianne Moore scene in the living room with the coffee was about as predictable as cinema gets. That is one of the aspects of the film I thoroughly did not enjoy.

All in all, I feel like this film could have been a lot darker and touched on the gothic a lot more. I think there was far too much 'fun' in there and it was trying to be too many things at once. Though the movie is an enjoyable watch and in most respects, a good film - I cannot help but feeling there was just too much of everything that was going on. There were too many 'wise cracks' and too many characters, the subplots were not explored enough because there was too much going on with the main storyline. I liked it - I just didn't love it.