Review of The 'Burbs (1989) by Edith N — 05 Nov 2010

Where They Not Only Know Your Name but Your Magazine Subscriptions.

Someone I know online really resents movies like this. Well, sort of like this. Works of fiction set in the suburbs where everyone knows everyone else. He says that the suburbs aren't really like that. And it's true that I've lived in neighbourhoods where we didn't really talk to anyone. However, my entire childhood, we knew everyone. There were the Bostwicks down the road; I used to babysit for the twins. Renay across the street whose house we went to the afternoon Dad died. We had several different families in the house next door over the years, but I can still tell you all kinds of things about all of them. (Well, two families and Sherri the stockbroker from Simi Valley who never really fit in.) There were the people down the street with a goat. Kiburi and his brother lived with their mom; Kiburi played violin and was in my grade. And so forth. Those suburbs do actually exist, and not just in the minds of screenwriters. Even when we didn't know people's names, they had identifiers such as "the people with the red and green gates.".

Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) is on vacation. His wife, Carol (Carrie Fisher), wants him to go up to the lake, but he complains that he won't actually relax there. Though she points out that he won't relax at home, either, and it's true. Especially when he sees the neighbours, the Klopeks, doing mysterious things in their yard at night. Art Weingartner (Rick Ducommun) and Lieutenant Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), two more of his neighbours, basically egg him on in his suspicions, and they begin a campaign that makes Jem and Scout and Dil's pursuit of Boo Radley look circumspect. And by campaign, I mean we actually get Rumsfield on the roof serving as a lookout at one point. With a gun. A real one. And the whole thing is witnessed with great delight by neighbour kid Ricky Butler (Corey Feldman) and with great exasperation by Carol and by Bonnie Rumsfield (Wendy Schaal).

Ricky tells his girlfriend (Heather Haase) that this is the real excitement. The movies, he says, aren't real, and this is real. Now, of course, Ricky lucks out. It's not every neighbourhood where you've got guys cutting the power to the whole block at least so they can dig for bodies in someone's basement. Most suburbs have a lot more bike-riding and fewer serial killers. On the other hand, Ricky does kind of have a point. Take away the Klopeks, and you still have a bunch of people who spend time together pretty much because they happen to have bought houses next door to one another. When Sherri put up that six-foot-tall redwood fence around her property, we talked about nothing else for weeks. For one thing, she cut all the sun from the Bostwicks' kitchen window, which was only about five or ten feet away from the fence. The mailman was mad, because she extended it up to the street and took away his shortcut. She, on the other hand, was terrified of half the neighbours because they were weird. Things like that happen in the suburbs. The new neighbour always gets talked about, if you live in that kind of neighbourhood, and grudges can simmer for years over six inches of branch stretching over a property line.

We forget, I think, that Tom Hanks really is an accomplished comedian. He doesn't do it much these days, which is kind of a shame. At this point in his career, he was still a few years from being taken seriously as an actor, but these days, it seems he's only allowed to be funny in the movies when he's voicing an animated toy cowboy. He's good. Indeed, the same basic feature is what sells him in both aspects of his career. The fact is, he really is nice. (The fun thing is that it doesn't even seem to be "he has a nice persona." He's just [i]nice[/i].) He's likable. Yeah, when he was Uncle Ned on [i]Family Ties[/i], he was a drunk who ended up slugging Alex (Michael J. Fox), but really, when you got right down to it, didn't we all want to slug Alex? I mean, that was something we could relate to. Similarly, here, we can relate to this man getting drawn further and further into this insane spiral of stalking the weird family next door.

Secretly, though, I liked Carrie Fisher best. I liked that she just kind of shook her head and went on with things through a substantial part of the movie, after which she just couldn't take it anymore. She really basically does tell Art and Rumsfield--and I can't help wondering if he's named after Donald Rumsfeld, all things considered--that Ray can't come out to play now. They're acting like little boys together, all three of them, and she has somehow ended up playing mommy, given that Bonnie clearly isn't competent to. Art's wife (Patrika Darbo) has gone off somewhere, I never quite got where, but that works, too. He's playing hooky from real life. The grown-up is gone. Carol ends up having to babysit. Unfortunately, when Ray manages to get her out of the way so they can carry out their ridiculous plan, the only person that's left to look after them is Ricky. And Ricky is many things--keen-eyed observer of human nature, generous host, enthusiastic participant--but responsible adult he is not. After all, he doesn't seem to get any work done painting his house, which is what he's supposed to be doing the whole time.