Suburbicon

This operatic black comedy sets two neighbouring stories in an idyllic 1959 American suburb. 

The opening real estate commercial sells the new neighbourhood as a secure, safe, self-contained American Eden. It’s the kind of neighbourhood where the mailman knows everyone by name. 

When an African-American family move in, the white bigotry is at first played as comedy. Here it’s the whites who ardently beg for the right to live there and who avow: “We shall overcome.” Director George Clooney assumes we assume that modern America has left ‘50s prejudice and complacency long behind. 

But maybe not. The black family’s neighbours demand the community build a fence to hide them from their view, a fence the families won’t have to pay for. Sound familiar? Clooney’s 1959 fable of racism and white corruption is a projection of Trump’s America, fence and all.  America then is America now. This twinning repeats in Julianne Moore playing both sisters, the victim and the killer.

The neighbours’ outrage swells, from refusing to serve the woman in the supermarket, through an assault by noise and rage, and finally mob violence. 

  In the second story a young white family man and executive Gardner Lodge initially seems the victim of a home invasion, which kills his wife (whom he had crippled in a car accident).  Turns out he and his sister-in-law have contracted the two thugs to murder his wife. They plan to cash in on her insurance and escape to Aruba. This neat scheme balloons into a grand guignol orgy of murders. Indeed even the All-American milk and PBJ on sliced white prove poisonous. 

The two stories connect through the two families’ young sons. They become friends, playing baseball. The African American Andy gives the white Nicky a garter snake. They talk through the old tin-cans-on-a-string phone. In the last scene the two boys play catch across their backyard fence, while the pallid infestation of bungalows spreads out to the horizon. 

The boys playing could be an image from the ad. But the innocence is gone. The Gardners, the wife’s siblings, the thugs, the corrupt insurance investigator, all are dead. The snake survives, an innocent reminder of the fall from the original Garden of Eden. Here it’s the people not the snake that are the threat to innocence. Even the shrewd insurance investigator — who should be the film’s agent of justice — proves a greedy self-serving fraud, whose falsehood deserves his death by a lye.

Can we grab hope from the two boys’ friendship? Not really. One is an orphan; the other is still in that threatened family. Anyway, we know that sixty years later the film’s dynamic continues to play out. The corrupt, violent white society blames the innocent blacks for all their issues, failures, moral compromises. In the film, while the neighbourhood whites assail the black family, the murderous fraud in their own midst unspools unchecked.   
     Clooney directs films with a political bite: The Monuments Men, The Ides of March, Leatherheads, Good Night and Good Luck, going back to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. This new work undermines Trump’s nostalgia for the lost “great” America by exposing the fraud, corruption and racism that remain powerful enough to have elected him. Like Trump, this idyllic suburbia is a con.