Review of Suburbicon (2017) by Dave E — 28 Oct 2017

This film reeks of political admonition. There is a term, coined a couple of years ago, "Virtue Signalling." Virtue signaling is the idea that people today will often complain about things on social media in order to show how wonderful and virtuous they are and score points with friends of the same ilk. For instance, one might post "F--- Trump" or "Black Lives Matter" or whatever, in order to show that they are on the right side of an issue. This film is a twenty-five million dollar exercise in virtue signalling.

I can sum up this film in a single sentiment. Black people are good and white people are bad. Done. That's it. That's the entire film.

I don't remember ever reading about anything that the black family in this film had to endure, ever happening in real life, historically. It's one of those creative liberties filmmakers take in order to make their point, but when you set something like this in a historical context, people often think it's true to history, which is an awful thing to do to people. The theory among filmmakers I have spoken with is, "We're just artists, if the public believes us, that's just them being stupid." But it's not just them being stupid, because often what we're putting on the screen is very convincing, and there is sometimes no obvious reason to be skeptical of the veracity of the filmmaker. Most people don't go around lying generally, and we expect that filmmakers are the same way, but they aren't all that way.

The other thing that pissed me off (and this may just be me) is Hollywood's unrelenting hatred of the 50s as a false paradise. Because of TV shows like The Andy Griffith Show (1960) Leave it to Beaver (1957) Father Knows Best (1954) and other such shows, we are left with a kind of positive nostalgia in the historical record of the 50s and early 60s and, in the 80s, there was a strong nostalgia for the 50s and 60s and it was romanticized on Television and in Films. But then, for some reason, in the 90s, Hollywood began to try to dismantle this notion. They began to portray the era as fake. The 50s became a dark era with a pretty facade, and it was portrayed as super creepy. This sort of thing can be fun for horror films, or to challenge conventional ideas about things, but it's incredibly damaging to our ideas of real history. Because, although the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, had good and bad people, just like today, the post-war 50s was, in fact, an era of extreme optimism and much happiness for many Amerians, and there were GENUINE people back then. I know this personally because, although I wasn't around back then, this is when my parents grew up, and my family is that All-American family, and they were genuine, and they were that happy, and there was that positivity and optimism.

The acting, the sets, the wardrobe are all cartoonish. The story is predictable from begining to end. It was really a bore.

The cinematography is about the only thing that one might recommend this film for, but only if you like that quirky Cohen Brothers symmetry thing, which I sort of do.