The just-released first trailer for the George Clooney-directed Suburbicon looks like a Coen brothers take on Revolutionary Road. The Coen-y vibes come not only from the fact that all of its stars — Julianne Moore (The Big Lebowski), Matt Damon (True Grit), and Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis) — and its director (O Brother Where Art Thou, Hail, Caesar!) have worked with the Coens, but…also because of the focus on an America that sees itself a certain way, while brutality and nihilism pumps through its veins. Oh, right, and also because, surprise(!), the Coen Brothers wrote the screenplay.
In the film, Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, a suburb-dweller whose wife is seemingly murdered in a home invasion — and who then himself dives into the underbelly of crime and violence the Coens so often posit quietly pervades everyday life, until it, say, kills your family member.
“This is a tale of very flawed people making very bad choices,” reads the official description. Julianne Moore’s character — Lodge’s sister-in-law (or sister?), Margaret – enters the equation, and contributes to those choices. (It makes for a pretty fantastic-seeming equation, escalating in, amongst other things, a blonde-permed Moore crying while crushing pharmaceuticals with a rolling pin, which somehow seems like a beautiful exaggerated summation of her best work.)
And Oscar Isaac also soon comes into the mix, as a sharply dressed man named Roger who emphasizes he “could have [Damon’s character] killed in no time.” The plot revelations are pretty limited to what you see in the trailer thus far, but Clooney told Yahoo! Movies, “Oscar Isaac comes in and sets into motion a series of pretty horrendous crimes. Basically, Oscar gets to come in and steal the movie.”
Watch the trailer:
Suburbicon will be out on November 3.