Pick up a rock in a garden and, as pretty as the rock may be, it’s a good bet that vermin dwell beneath it. Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) in “Suburbicon” just may empathize with them.
Gardner comes across as the average 1950s suburbanite, which is the whole point of living in a cookie-cutter community in which neighbors are barely distinguishable from one another. But could something rotten be lurking in his soul? And could that explain his seeming indifference to the fact that newcomers to the neighborhood — an African-American family — are under cruel and unrelenting physical attack?
Perhaps Gardner is just too distracted by his own woes. A home invasion that he was powerless to resist has resulted in the death of a loved one. What’s left is a family consisting of Gardner, his sister-in-law Maggie (Julianne Moore) and his son, Nicky (Noah Jupe). Gardner appears to be traumatized by the break-in and obsessed with bringing the men responsible to justice.
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But he may be hiding something — or, in fact, a few things. And a shady insurance investigator (Oscar Isaac) has his suspicions.
Meanwhile, the neighbors are doing their best to make sure that the black family feels extremely unwelcome.
“Suburbicon” is a flawed attempt at dark comedy, but it’s hardly the disaster that critical buzz would have you believe. Working from a screenplay that he co-wrote with Grant Heslov and Joel and Ethan Coen, director George Clooney creates a mashup of social critique, noir homage and ’50s sendup that struggles to coalesce into a cohesive whole, but it is way more interesting than most of the movies occupying multiplexes these days.
In his quirkiest performance since “The Informant!,” Damon is scarily entertaining. And Moore goes all in as an amoral homemaker.
If you’re merely out for a good time at the movies, you can safely skip “Suburbicon.” But true film buffs will want to peek behind the blinds of Clooney’s latest directorial endeavor.
What “Suburbicon” • Three stars out of four • Run time 1:45 • Rating R • Content Violence, language and sexuality