The prevailing tone in screenplays written by Joel and Ethan Coen can grate if you prefer a story that is less inclined to archness in its presentation.
George Clooney’s latest movie as director, co-written by the pair, gilds the lily in dealing with its themes and is loaded with the brothers’ sneering mockery of the hand that fed them in their privileged, sheltered youth – but that doesn’t mean that it’s not pretty good. Suburbicon is an all-white, pleasant-valley community into which a black family has moved.
The locals are outraged by the presence of coloured folks in their midst and their hostility, at first merely simmering, eventually explodes into riotous aggression. But this is only background to the main drama surrounding Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) and the strife he has got himself into with debt collectors from the Mob. In cinematic terms, Lodge is a first cousin of William H. Macy’s hapless car salesman in Fargo (1996) – another film in which character is determined by postcode. As the ‘little man’ who digs a hole for himself as a result of his own scamming and lying, Lodge personifies the hypocrisy that lies not far below society’s façade of respectability.
We might have worked that out for ourselves without Clooney and the Coens’ heavy-handed approach, but nuance and subtlety rarely get a start in this type of flick – the opening sequence, featuring a smiley chubby mailman making his personalised deliveries borders on the undergraduate in its silly stereotyping of middle-class suburbia.
Things go from bad to worse for Lodge, and the body count rises with each unforeseen twist. The vivid cinematography of Robert Elswit combined with Alexandre Desplat’s at times overwrought score create an operatic atmosphere perfectly suited to the tragedy unfolding, but Julianne Moore playing both Lodge’s wife and her sister in the same room (like Armie Hammer in The Social Network) is needlessly indulgent. Noah Jupe is terrific as Lodge’s little boy, witnessing it all, but Oscar Isaac nearly steals the show as the sleazy insurance investigator.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
