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GREENER GRASS
Directors: Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe Cast: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe, Beck Bennett, Neil Casey, Mary Holland, Janicza Bravo, D'Arcy Carden MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:35 Release Date: 10/18/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 17, 2019 Admirably absurd but not much else, Greener Grass is a strange and almost indecipherable satire of suburban life. Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, who wrote and directed the movie (based on a short the pair also wrote), have created a weird world, where just about anything can happen and nobody seems to think it's odd. To do so would be to stand out from the crowd. Such a thing is intolerable in this place, where everyone wears braces on their teeth and, at one point, a child transforms into a dog. At another point, a woman hides a soccer ball beneath her dress, announces she's pregnant, and "gives birth" to a bouncing baby ball. "Normal" is only what people determine it to be. This is normal for soccer moms Jill (DeBoer) and Lisa (Luebbe). The story opens with Lisa complimenting Jill's new baby, and to reciprocate, Jill offers Lisa to take the newborn as her own. Lisa accepts, and that starts Jill down the path of second-guessing what happens in this bright and colorful town. She's basically stuck in her own game, which no one agreed to but that everyone plays. That, along with the murder of a woman by a stranger (which people only care about because it involves their own lives), is the closest the movie comes to a plot. The setup is mostly an excuse for a series of absurdist gags that twist and distort the usual happenings in a sleepy little place such as this. From the start, DeBoer and Luebbe, in terms of both filmmaking and performance, establish the wacky wavelength of this world. It's up to us to connect to it or feel even more like an outsider. The constant assault of jokes certainly helps, whether it's each woman mistaking the other's husband (Beck Bennett and Neil Casey play the spouses) for her own or the local school teacher (played by D'Arcy Carden), leading students in a song about her mother—who slaughtered her family. All of it becomes stranger and stranger, even as everyone in town just accepts whatever strange thing happens. In a way, Greener Grass is kind of a one-punch-line movie, in that, while the jokes are only limited by the filmmakers' imaginations, the same point keeps being hammered home by the gags. The strangest thing, then, is that this bizarre movie starts to feel repetitive. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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