Spoilers below.
We spend the remaining ~90 minutes following the absolutely terrible escapades of their family. Gardner, has landed them in some sort of financial trouble with the mob, and to dig himself out of it he gets involved in an insurance scheme that results in the murder of his wife Rose, in front of his son, Nicky.
All of the White protagonists in the film, with the exception of Nicky, are pretty terrible people. Gardner is unsympathetic as a heartless husband and a distant father. The slain wife’s twin, Margaret, doesn’t hesitate for a second to assume her sister’s position. She dyes her hair blonde to match her sister’s, attempts to sternly parent Nicky, oh yeah, and sleeps with her sister’s husband.
Meanwhile the filmmakers occasionally check in on the rising tensions caused by the Meyers arrival. The neighborhood takes it upon themselves to surround the house 24/7, banging on drums and kettles constantly to try to drive them out.
Their Black neighbor, (who isn’t even given a first name, she’s just known as Mrs. Meyers) is Michelle Obama levels of sainthood. The best scene in the film is when she’s trying to buy groceries and the store proprietor arbitrarily raises the price of each item to a whopping $20 a piece. She embodies composure in the face of blatant racism. I would have much preferred to see a film about her, yet we get stuck with the trash that is the Lodge family.
You know it’s bad when you want to sympathize with an insurance investigator. Oscar Isaac briefly shows up mid way through the film to investigate Gardner’s life insurance claim on his wife. You think the characters are finally going to get their comeuppance, and it gave me brief hope that the film was going to turn it around. Nope, he’s just as corrupt and terrible as the rest of them.
The film culminates in tensions at the Meyers house coming to a head, with the community getting violent and destructive. It also results in multiple murders connected to the Lodges, but by this point in the film one is not particularly invested in their salvation. Of course no one notices the chaos at the Lodge’s because they’re all too focused on the Meyers.
I understand what the Coens and Clooney were trying to do. To say we’re so blinded by our obsession with race, that we overlook the monstrosities that happen in our own backyard. They attempt to do so in a beyond imbalanced way. Instead of making them symbols, they reduce the Black characters mere objects (not even giving them first names? Come on….). Instead of tactfully weaving in the juxtapositioning of the escalation of violence towards the Meyers family with the rising corruption of the Lodge family, who by Suburbicon standards are the ideal neighbors, the filmmakers bookend the film with clumsy parables.
In their attempts to show how “woke” they are, the filmmakers forget how to tell a story. Now imagine if you will the same premise in the hands of a Jordan Peele, Ava DuVernay, hell even a Mark Duplass (see Creep). Just anyone who has more recently displayed a better understanding of how to tell a story involving race without beating you over the head with it, or trying to strip it of it’s complexity. Clooney and the Coens were not the right people to make this film, but appear to have too much clout and privilege to have anyone warn them otherwise.
