27% on Rotten Tomatoes
Chloe's thoughts: It's alright;
Proceed at your own risk
Watch it if you: Are a fan of the cast;
Have nothing better to do;
Are bored at home
In Suburbicon, nothing ever happens. It is a safe, peaceful, and idyllic suburb for you to raise your family. But events start occurring that start to shake the tranquility of Suburbicon.
I had seen the trailer for this sooo many times when I went to watch other movies, and I was pretty excited for it. Seeing that it was written by the Coen brothers, directed by George Clooney, and starred Matt Damon, I was down. And while I don't regret seeing this movie, the film's interesting plot had a lot more potential than what this film did with it.
So as I said, the trailer for this seemed super interesting, and I thought it was going to be a pretty good dark comedy. And the movie starts off like this. The opening scene is pretty funny, however over the course of the movie it starts to get a bit boring.
Unfortunately it ended up not being as funny as the trailers made it out to be, and another thing is that the movie seemed to lack direction
Don't get me wrong, the plot was actually interesting, but there are still quite a few issues with it.
Firstly, there are two plots happening in this movie. There's the main one with Matt Damon's family, and then there's a subplot that serves as a social commentary on racism in the neighbourhood.
The main plot is the interesting one. It's a bit bizarre, but in an interesting way. It's not really what the trailers tell you, but if you've seen the trailers enough times (I think I saw it like 3 or 4 times because it would play whenever I saw a movie in the cinemas), then there are scenes in the trailer that spoil this movie. Because things happen in the film that make you recall scenes in the trailer, and that makes the film lose its element of surprise.
However this might be a reason why I thought this film was a little predictable. I'm not usually clever enough to guess the ending of movies, but from near the start of the film you have a rough idea of where they're going with this. I suppose there's nothing too wrong with that, I mean predictability could make it more intriguing and funny, but this was not executed well and the film became quite boring later on. Some scenes went by slowly and it felt like a drag even though it was a short movie (with a run time of 1 hour and 45 minutes).
The subplot on racism was pretty funny and interesting at the start, and in fact I actually thought that was going to be the main plot, but it ends up going nowhere. It serves as pretty good social commentary, but it's so oddly sprinkled throughout this whacky Matt Damon plot that it's just out of place and feels like they're just forcing a racism lesson down our throats the entire movie. Towards the end of the movie I kept thinking, "If this film manages to tie in this racism thing to the main plot, that would be GENIUS!" But it didn't. It just went nowhere.
I will say, though, that none of the faults are with the acting. Matt Damon and Julianne Moore did excellent jobs here, and you even have a small appearance by Oscar Isaac that's fantastic.
The kid actor in this, Noah Jupe, did a fantastic job as well. He's pretty much the only character that you root for and have compassion for, and he did a really convincing job for his age.
But overall, this film just had a lot more potential. I think if the Coen brothers were the ones that were directing it, it would have been much better. It has an average rating of 4.8/10 on Rotten Tomatoes and that sounds about right. It's nothing special and I wouldn't tell anyone to watch it in theatres, but it's interesting if you're a fan of the cast or that sort of feel of the movie, where they live in an idyllic society that ends up not being so idyllic after all. The cast are great, but the pacing and tone is weird. It's not really a dark comedy satire, but it tries to be, and the two different subplots means the film loses its direction. It could have done with being maybe 15 minutes shorter, and focusing on the comedy a bit more. It's still interesting, though, but probably for something you would watch at home when you're bored and curious. I wouldn't watch it again though.
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