{"id":115674,"date":"2017-09-03T02:00:54","date_gmt":"2017-09-03T06:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=115674"},"modified":"2017-09-03T02:00:54","modified_gmt":"2017-09-03T06:00:54","slug":"clooney-depicts-american-dream-as-nightmare-in-suburbicon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2017\/09\/03\/clooney-depicts-american-dream-as-nightmare-in-suburbicon\/","title":{"rendered":"Clooney depicts American dream as nightmare in ‘Suburbicon’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"George<\/a>
George Clooney au festival de Cannes, May 2016 (Photo By Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

VENICE, Italy — Affable, handsome George Clooney was all charm at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, but don’t be fooled.<\/p>\n

The actor says his latest directorial effort, \u201cSuburbicon,\u201d is an angry movie for an angry country — his own. It’s a twisted tale of darkness at the heart of the American dream.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of us are angry — angry at ourselves, angry at the way that the country is going, angry at the way the world is going,\u201d Clooney told reporters Saturday in Venice, Italy, where \u201cSuburbicon\u201d is competing for the festival’s Golden Lion prize.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s probably the angriest I have ever seen the country, and I lived through the Watergate period of time,\u201d he added. \u201cThere is a dark cloud hanging over our country right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

America’s divisions give an unnerving timeliness to \u201cSuburbicon.\u201d The satirical film noir stars Matt Damon and Julianne Moore as residents of a seemingly idyllic — and all-white — 1950s suburban community that erupts in anger when a black family moves in.<\/p>\n

It fuses a script by the Coen brothers with a narrative about racial divisions inspired — in a negative way — by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was watching a lot of speeches on the campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating minorities,\u201d Clooney said.<\/p>\n

That set Clooney and writing-producing partner Grant Heslov to thinking about other points in United States history when forces of division were in the ascendant. They remembered 1957 events in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a model suburban community where white residents rioted at the arrival of a black family.<\/p>\n

They fused that idea to an unproduced script by Joel and Ethan Coen about a similar white-picket-fence community where a crime goes horribly wrong in farcically bloody ways.<\/p>\n

The images of white rage in the movie feel unnervingly contemporary, recalling last month’s rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, these are issues that are never out of vogue in our country,\u201d Clooney said ahead of the film’s red carpet premiere. \u201cWe are still trying to exorcise these problems. We’ve still got a lot of work to do from our original sin of slavery and racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

On one level, \u201cSuburbicon\u201d is a comedy, in which the best-laid plans of Damon’s scheming corporate executive go bloodily astray. Damon and Moore practically explode with suburban repression, and there’s a delicious turn by Oscar Isaac as a prying insurance investigator.<\/p>\n

Saturday was Damon’s second time on the Venice red carpet this week. He also stars in Alexander Payne’s \u201cDownsizing,\u201d in which — as so often — he portrays a likable everyman.<\/p>\n

But Damon also can play the psychopath, as he demonstrated memorably in \u201cThe Talented Mr. Ripley.\u201d In \u201cSuburbicon,\u201d he’s a bland suburbanite who becomes a monster.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t really get to play the bad guy a lot, but I do get a nice range of roles,\u201d Damon said.<\/p>\n

He recalled Payne telling him, \u201cI like you because you don’t look like a movie star.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I know exactly what he meant,\u201d Damon said. \u201cI look kind of like an average American person, so I think directors get to have fun playing with different variations of what that might mean.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all the bloody fun in \u201cSuburbicon,\u201d the social concerns Clooney displayed in previous films he directed — including \u201cGood Night, and Good Luck\u201d and \u201cThe Ides of March\u201d — are never far from the surface.<\/p>\n

The Clooney Foundation he runs with his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, gave $1 million in the wake of Charlottesville to the Southern Poverty Law Center to combat hate groups.<\/p>\n

Clooney said he was anxious that \u201cSuburbicon\u201d not be a polemic or \u201ca civics lesson.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted it to be funny, we wanted it to be mean,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is certainly angry, and it got angrier as we were shooting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VENICE, Italy — Affable, handsome George Clooney was all charm at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, but don’t be …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":115675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[2668,22723,22724,14124,22725,20641],"class_list":["post-115674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","tag-george-clooney","tag-grant-heslov","tag-julianne-moore","tag-matt-damon","tag-suburbicon","tag-venice-film-festival","mauthors-jill-lawless","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}