“The names Joel and Ethan Coen pop up on a lot of screenplays these days (Bridge of Spies, Unbroken), now that they’re getting credit for the kind of script-polishing they used to do anonymously,” begins Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “But Suburbicon marks the first time a script that could have been a full-blown major Coen brothers film has been brought to the screen by someone else. The movie, directed by George Clooney, who along with his partner Grant Heslov re-wrote an old unproduced Coen brothers project (all four are now credited), stars Matt Damon as a dour, weaselly, amateur family-man criminal in the U.S. suburbs of 1959, and it’s clearly a close cousin to Fargo.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney finds that “the material has some nasty charms, for sure. But it pushes too hard from the start, then steadily goes off the rails from dark to dyspeptic, lacking the originality, bite or tonal consistency to make up for dipping from a very familiar James M. Cain well. Its bigger problem is a timely subplot about virulent racism among white Americans that comes off as a mishandled afterthought.”
“Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) has a young son Nicky (Noah Jupe) and a surly, wheelchair-bound wife Rose (Julianne Moore) whose twin sister Margaret (also Moore, obviously) and brash, overweight brother Mitch (Gary Basaraba) round out the extended family unit,” writes Jessica Kiang, setting it up at the Playlist. “When the Lodges are victims of a home invasion and the overzealous application of chloroform results in Rose’s death, Margaret moves in ‘because the boy needs a mother’ with a haste that is a little unseemly. She even dyes her hair blonde to better resemble her dead sister, or as we Hitchcock fans like to call it, she self-Vertigos. This is all pretty suspicious, not just for audiences familiar with Fargo or Double Indemnity, but also for little Nicky, and for a smarmy claims investigator enliveningly, and all too briefly, played by Oscar Isaac. The body count ticks upward. Uneven though it is, the film is peppered with enough cherishable dialogue tics and dummkopf punchlines to make it a enjoyable watch.”
“Two narratives now play out,” writes Screen’s Fionnuala Halligan, “and it’s no surprise to read in the film’s production notes that they were written separately. The original Coen brothers script centered on the Lodge family, headed up by embattled patriarch Gardner (Damon), while Clooney and Heslov add an adapted-from-real-life strand, based around what actually happened when a black family moved into Levittstown, Pensylvania in 1957. They remain two separate movies bundled together by a single, tentative connection between the two young boys.”
“It’s a film about segregation and walls, spotlighting a corn-fed American darkness that lurks behind the white picket fence,” writes the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “All of which is entirely valid, given the state of the current quisling U.S. government. I just wish the actual film wasn’t so skimpy and brash and so evidently pleased with itself. There’s no danger of this one keeping the president up at night.”
Clooney’s “filmmaking career started promisingly enough with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (helped greatly by its Charlie Kaufman screenplay),” writes Alonso Duralde at TheWrap, “but since then it’s been a parade of adequacies (Good Night, and Good Luck, The Ides of March), mediocrity (Leatherheads) and downright catastrophe (The Monuments Men). Clooney’s directorial legacy won’t get any help from Suburbicon, a garish and overblown crime melodrama that . . . veers back and forth between the obvious and the ridiculous.”
VIDEO
“Like a pub-rock cover band, Suburbicon can be bluntly effective when playing the old hits,” writes Ben Croll for IndieWire. “Sure, it’s not the real deal, but if you get into the music, overlook a couple bum notes and let those pints do their work, you can reasonably groove along. . . . Oscar Isaac shows up wearing Jon Polito’s mustache and does that Oscar Isaac thing of being the best part of any film that he’s in.”
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.
from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2wsNWyF
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento