Suburbicon film review: A macabre comedy with too few laughs

Surburbicon is a great place to raise a family, so we’re cheerily told. It is 1959 and this sumptuously shot, idyllic, all-white American suburb is full of identical, immaculate houses, neat picket fences and manicured lawns.

It is a seemingly perfect and happy community — that is, until a black family, the Mayers, move in and suddenly things are not so rosy. A petition is put together and, at a noisy town hall meeting, the message is clear: we don’t want them here. The mood soon turns violent and the family is subject to an angry, Confederate-flag waving mob demonstrating outside their home. The film is, in part, based on a 1957 true-life crime case in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

But this is only half the story in George Clooney’s latest film as director. Surburbicon, a dark, crime, comic satire, is essentially two stories trying to merge into one. Clooney, along with co-writer Grant Heslov, has adapted an unproduced 1980s Coen brothers script and combined it with his own screenplay (all four are credited).

The main plot stars Matt Damon as dependable, white-collar executive, Gardner Lodge, who lives in Surburbicon with his wife, Rose (Julianne Moore) — left wheelchair-bound after an accident — and their young son, Nicky (Noah Jupe). Rose’s sister, Maggie, also played by Moore, is a frequent visitor. One night, Nicky is woken when two thugs — who appear to want to loot their home — invade the Lodges’ house. It is an invasion with disastrous consequences.