Suburbicon

Release date: 27th November 2017/Watch the trailer here

If Suburbicon feels like two films rolled into one, that’s because it pretty much is. The film is an amalgamation of an old screenplay written by Joel and Ethan Coen combined with an idea of director George Clooney’s, involving racism in the late 1950s. The result is a story about the Lodge family – father Gardner (Matt Damon), mother Rose and her sister Margaret (both played by Julianne Moore), and son Nicky (Noah Jupe) – whose peaceful life in a seemingly idyllic suburban community is disturbed by a home invasion. It’s essentially Fargo lite, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but Clooney’s decision to incorporate his racism subplot (a black family move into the all-white Suburbicon, and the neighbours attempt to drive them out) is unfathomable.

The problem is, this subplot has very little – if anything – to do with the rest of the film. There’s nothing wrong with the concept – and it probably could have worked well had it been fully fleshed out in its own film – but by relegating it to the sidelines as the main plot of Suburbicon plays out, Clooney gets the execution of his own idea entirely wrong. As for the murder-mystery that takes up most of the runtime, there’s an awful lot of murder but very little mystery. We find out what happened early on in the film, and this is never built upon further: nothing is revealed, nothing is developed, no characters we thought were good end up being bad or vice versa. Not every film needs a plot twist, but Suburbicon certainly needed something to make it a little more compelling, because as it is, we’re watching a mildly entertaining story play out in exactly the way we expect it to.

The actors appeared to realise that Suburbicon wasn’t worth the effort, too, and most of them – Damon in particular – phone it in. The only memorable character is insurance agent Bud Cooper (Oscar Isaac), whose scenes are by far the best of the whole film – and, coincidentally, some of the only scenes left unchanged from the Coens’ original script – but Isaac is criminally underused, amounting to little more than ten minutes of screen time.

Isaac’s character is a good example of what’s so frustrating about Suburbicon: there’s a good film buried in there somewhere (possibly even two), but under Clooney’s direction it’s become something of a muddled, unfulfilling mess, with so many different ideas all fighting for attention. With so much talent involved both behind and in front of the camera, Suburbicon had a lot of potential – so it’s almost baffling that in the end, it never amounts to much more than just okay.

★★★

Money Monster

Release date: 27th May 2016/Watch the trailer here

Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest film in a recent succession of movies with money on their mind. However, unlike some of those that came before it – The Big Short, for example – Money Monster is less of a focused look at the financial crash, and more of a tense, entertaining thriller, that just so happens to have anger about money matters at its centre.

George Clooney plays Lee Gates, the smug, selfish host of a successful money television show, directed by Julia Robert’s long-suffering (and far more likeable) Patty Fen. The show is in full swing – Clooney pulling out the dad dance moves in a variety of embarrassing costumes, and so on – when it is disrupted by the arrival of Jack O’Connell’s gun-wielding Kyle Budwell, live on air. Cue Gates reevaluating his life choices while strapped into a vest laden with explosives, but despite this predictability, it’s refreshing to see a male lead act genuinely, realistically terrified when he has a gun pointed to his head.

Clooney plays the character perfectly, even managing to achieve genuine chemistry with Julia Roberts, despite their characters communicating mostly via earpiece and sharing very little screen time. O’Connell, too, gives an effective performance: intense and yet sympathetic. The real villain of Money Monster is CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West) – Budwell is merely an incensed investor who has lost everything, thanks to the titular money monsters.

The standoff that ensues – broadcast live to millions of viewers – unfurls in real time, creating an atmosphere that is successfully suspenseful, interrupted only by unnecessary visits to places other than the Money Monster studio which occasionally disrupt the tension.

Still, Money Monster manages to succeed both as a fast-paced thriller and a conspiracy drama, holding together as it leaps from genre to genre, mainly thanks to how utterly watchable Clooney is. It may be nothing that we haven’t seen before, but it’s entertaining enough for that to not particularly matter.

★★★★

Hail, Caesar!

Release date: 4th March 2016/Watch the trailer here

Hail, Caesar! is the latest film written and directed by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, following 2013’s phenomenal Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coens set their own bar incredibly high, but to say that Hail, Caesar! isn’t as good as Inside Llewyn Davis (and truthfully, it isn’t) is really an invalid comparison to make, because the Coen connection is where the similarities between the two films begin and end.

Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix in Hail, Caesar!, a Hollywood fixer for the fictional studio Capitol Pictures, who is responsible for keeping its stars in line. The film follows a day in his hectic life, centring around the kidnapping of George Clooney’s actor – and the star of the studio’s Biblical epic, ‘Hail, Caesar! A Tale Of The Christ’ – Baird Whitlock. It would, however, be inaccurate to say that George Clooney is the film’s main player; this is Brolin’s film – and he carries such a chaotic film with a quiet, confident calm – while the disappearance of Baird Whitlock is just one storyline interspersed with many.

There is also Scarlett Johansson’s DeeAnna Moran, a starlet whose wholesome image is at risk of being ruined by a pregnancy with no father; Ralph Fiennes’ British director Laurence Laurentz, who worries for his respected name following the casting of ‘dust actor’ Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) as the leading man in his drama, ‘Merrily We Dance’; and Tilda Swinton’s twin reporter sisters, Thora and Thessaly Thacker, locked in a sibling rivalry and both clamouring for an interview with the absent Baird Whitlock.

So many characters and storylines is perhaps the downfall of Hail, Caesar! It is left lacking any real, substantial plot, but it is also beautiful to look at and incredibly, hilariously wacky – style over substance, yes, but good fun and a glamorous look at Hollywood’s Golden Age, too.

Hail, Caesar! also features some fantastic set pieces – most notably, an elaborate song and tap dance number starring Channing Tatum’s Burt Gurney, and some hilariously funny gags – the ‘would that it were so simple’ scene starring Fiennes and Ehrenreich had the whole cinema in stitches. Ehrenreich is the most entertaining thing about the entire film: a relative newcomer cast cleverly in the role of a relative newcomer, he is charmingly hilarious, eliciting the majority of the film’s laughs.

I think that Hail, Caesar!‘s detractors are looking for too much from this film. It may not be breaking new ground for the Coens, but if you take it for what it is – an eccentric and occasionally surreal comedy that bounces from one flashy set piece to the next – then there’s much to be enjoyed here.

★★★★