Suburbicon Movie Review

            Matt Damon and Julianne Moore starring. George Clooney directing.  A Coen Brothers script. What’s not to like? Well according to most reviews and the effervescent Rotten Tomatoes, quite a bit.

            Thank goodness I didn’t read any of the reviews before going to the movie. The game for me with books and movies is if I can guess what’s going to happen next. The twists in Suburbicon took me by surprise, not just once, but several times.

            I liked the movie. There weren't a lot of laughs, but I left the theater smiling.

            The plot seems straightforward. Set in the 50s in a "planned" community, twin sisters, Rose and Maggie (both played by Moore), sit on the Lodge family backyard porch with Nicky (Noah Jupe), Rose’s young son. A black middle-class family, the Meyers, has moved into the house on the street behind them and their backyards converge, separated by a short, flimsy fence. Neighbors have voiced their concern over the new family. They’re worried about a rise in crime and devaluation of their homes.

            A boy, about the same age as Nicky, steps out of the Meyers’ house with a baseball glove and ball, and tosses it into the air. Nicky’s Aunt Maggie tells him to invite their new neighbor to play catch.

            Nice, huh?

            Well, don’t get too comfortable with your assumptions. The movie unwinds with what seems to be a tale of two families: the black family and the white Lodge family. But except for the boys who become friends, the two families never cross paths. As unruly crowds gather in front of the Meyers’ house, a robbery and murder occurs in the Lodge home. The perps are white, and one of them is scary mean (Glenn Fleshler). They chloroform the entire family, holding the cloth on Rose’s face for a long time. She dies, leaving a grieving husband, Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) and Nicky.

            Aunt Maggie steps into the role of caretaker for the family, only she quickly transitions into mean Auntie, all the while speaking in her soft, amenable voice. Moore’s acting is brilliant. She comes across as compliant, even when she’s grinding up lye for a white bread sandwich. I’m not gonna tell you who the intended victim is . . . that’s one of the surprises.

            The murders in the Lodge home multiply while the police fight off the angry white mob at the Meyers home. We see evil played out on two stages: Unthinking mob violence on one and Coen Brothers inspired psychopathology on another. The black family doesn’t fight back or seek to incite confrontation. The white family tries to solve its problems with more murders.

            In the end we’re left with the innocence of children, who guilelessly reach out to each other again.

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Sexy Screen Gems: Old Guys and Male Sexual Magnetism With a Side Trip Down the Slopes of Brad Pitt’s Lips

Some of you probably don’t even know who Robert Mitchum was. Ask your Mom. Mention Cape Fear, or The Night of the Hunter, in which he played villains.

Watched Mitchum in The Yakuza last night (1975, shot on location in Tokyo with a lot of respect for the landscape, architecture and culture). Not a great movie, but okay while doing paperwork. In it, Mitchum spoke Japanese free and easy, especially with the women. His character exudes sexual confidence, that clipped language flowing smooth and sexy over his thin, manly lips set above a huge vagina-clefted jaw.

He could have been describing machine parts, but he made it sound like an appreciative review of intimate acts — pillow talk. Mitchum made me believe he’d been in that situation with exotic women before, maybe in WWII where lean young men — shiny torsos more sinew than muscle — discovered women, possibly for the first time. 

In the Army, Mitchum was a medic assigned the duty of "pecker checker" — visual screening for syphilis. Ah, the innocent days of STD-yore.

The Yakuza in the film presented a very different form of manliness. Their boyish bodies --- unlike the current rendition (Bruce Lee, Jet Li) --- sported beautifully tattooed backs and shoulders. But for all their murderous sword-wielding they seemed a little light in the pinkie finger department if you know what I mean.

Some men stay friendly and flirty well into their 70's. Gene Hackman in Bonnie & Clyde (1967) was already losing his hair, his body soft, and out-of-condition at 37. I didn’t respond to him then, but paid closer attention when I saw him in The Firm (1993) with Jeanne Tripplehorn, who plays Tom Cruise’s wife (I’m focusing on Hackman when Cruise is in the picture??!!??). He’s 63 in this movie, and his character is ready to bed Tripplehorn, accept her luscious gifts with gratitude, able to recognize he’s in the right place at the right time (until he realizes that he’s not only not going to get laid — he’s going to die). Maybe I was responding more to Tripplehorn.

Sam Neill, Daniel Craig, George Clooney, Pierce Brosnan, Samuel L. Jackson, Clive Owen, Guy Pearce are the new sexy old guys. Bruce Willis projects that kind of sexual magnetism.  Ryan Gosling (The Notebook) looks like he might generate some long-term heat; Kevin Costner, sometimes; Ben Affleck, never.

I can’t make up my mind about Brad Pitt. He was all cocksure and hard buns and (hopefully chapped) pouting lips in Thelma & Louise, but his movies since then haven’t gotten me over the line.  It’s those iconic lips.

People with extra large lips have a cross to bear; they have to be just a little better at whatever it is they do.  It’s hard not to watch their lips, to wonder what it’s like to have that kind of power.  They must long to have people accept them as normal, to really hear them when they speak.