Film
Suburbicon
- Director
- George Clooney
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 104 mins
A racially-charged, satirical period crime comedy written and produced by the Coen brothers, directed by George Clooney and starring Matt Damon? That’s quite a pedigree. Alas, it appears that the script has actually been gathering dust in a drawer since the Coens wrote it way back in 1986, in the wake of the success of Blood Simple.
Critics were not overly kind when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Damon and Julianne Moore play an outwardly perfect, all-American couple raising their son in 1959. But there’s trouble lurking beneath the well-manicured surface of their all-white suburban idyll. And when a black family move in next door, community tensions go through the roof. Suburbicon is based in part on the true-life experiences of the first black folks to move into a white neighbourhood in Pennsylvania in 1957. But if this sits uneasily with the comic crime story, that’s probably because the two narratives were written separately and then stapled together.
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