It's fitting that, in a film about segregation, George Clooney's sixth directorial effort feels like two films divided. At the centre is a story from an old Coen Bros script, a satire of All-American '50s suburbia, White flight conformity, and Atomic Age aw-shucksery. It's all, as the familiar depiction goes, just a facade; the brochure-brought-to-life utopia really a dystopia. That's revealed by Matt Damon's hapless noir-ish stooge, who sinks into a downward spiral of Fargo-re-do bad choices. There's hired goons, ill-conceived plans, ping-pong-paddlin' infidelity, an ear for era dialogue, literal white bread, and when Oscar Isaac shows up, lord does this thing sing.
But Clooney and co-producer/script-tweaker Grant Heslov take this Coenist lark and shoot it through with a searing take on what All-American '50s suburbia represented: segregation, institutionalised racism, cultural whitewashing. Inspired by a real-life tale of persecution in 1957, in the pre-fab commuter-burb Levittown, New York, the flick also finds an African American family moving in next door, earning the ire of the Suburbicon-dwellers who fled the city in search of lilywhite conformity. Hoping to drive "these people" outta the there-goes-the-neighbourhood, local yokels harass them day and night; these angry mobs going from hostile gawping to a good old-fashioned race riot, gathering with the wild fury - if not the speed, delirium, or provocation - of the interlopers in Mother!.
This is a fine dramatic premise - especially given that, six decades on, there's still contemporary social resonance - but one deserving of its own film. Here, searing socio-critique is sidelined, consigned to B-story; the neighbouring family (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M Burke, Tony Espinosa) barely heard from, existing as symbolic figures, not fleshed-out characters. As Damon finds his life falling apart - his humiliation symbolising the death of father-knows-best paternalism - in black-comic fashion, the horrors of racist persecution sit, uneasily, alongside; the stories of the neighbours remaining separate, on either side of the subdivision fence. The contrast between them makes thematic sense - both stories depict the darkness of suburbia - but not for a coherent picture.
