A Look At The 2019 Film Greener Grass

A film camera in Hollywood

There is a scene in Greener Grass that summarizes the movie’s absurdist humor. In that scene, two mothers, Dawn Luebbe’s Lisa and Jocelyn DeBoer’s Jill, have a light talk as they watch their kids play soccer. Lisa congratulates Jill on her newborn with a surprised tone, in spite of the latter holding the kid for the whole match. Jill clarifies that she is grateful for it, and she gives Lisa the newborn following a pause. Then comes polite refusals from Lisa before she finally agrees to hold the infant. That scene comes at one of the first few points of the movie.

 

From that point onwards, you know that this movie operates on a bizarre and wacky path of comedy similar to the works of Eric Wareheim, John Waters, and Tim Heidecker. Luebbe and DoBoer wrote and directed the movie together, and they aim to make fun of lives in the suburbs. Essentially, it subjects suburbia to sharp critical analysis thanks to the writing of those two. No wonder why OC Weekly describes it as a case of looking at suburbia through a funhouse mirror.

 

In the upper-class city without a name, grown-ups wear braces, kids become animals, and a TV show like Bald Men and Bouquets makes for wholesome entertainment. That is the kind of world the protagonists have crafted here. Not even a minute passes in the movie without something outrageous being performed or said. Rather than feeling gimmicky and tired, DoeBoer and Luebbe’s screenplay consistently surprises us with its uncompromising weirdness.

 

The film revolves around their characters and their everyday struggles to keep their false show of perfection. Jill strives to take care of her marital life with Beck Bennett’s Nick. Anyhow, she strives more to make Julian (Julian Hilliard) look like the ideal son, despite him showing that he is not like that through his poor piano concert and so forth. The baby, Page, turns out to be a common plot element or theme in Greener Grass.

 

Lisa also struggles to make her son, Asher Miles Fallica’s Bob, keep paying attention to school. There is a much bigger struggle for her to maintain a romantic relationship with her husband, Neil Casey’s Dennis.

 

The two mothers associate with one another on fraternal terms. The wavering camaraderie of the duo proves that they are competing with each other for a dominant position in their circle. On the other hand, an anonymous lurker continues to steal the clothes of women who live in their town, which makes the residents paranoid.

Luebbe and DoBoer regularly watch Upright Citizens Brigade, so the duo plays off against each other as in an intense tennis match. The two characters show the perfect quality of being perky mixed with anxiety and confusion. Jill has good intentions, whereas Lisa has more self-consciousness than the former. The movie’s pastel colors, azure skies and synthesizer-laden soundtrack level the characters’ sunny dispositions. The soundtrack gives the film an air of suburban heaven.

All of those elements may be aesthetically soothing, but the main attraction of the film is the outrageous stuff that happens now and then. Bob gets addicted to a TV program known as ‘Kids With Knives’, which is about kids randomly exposed to cutlery without any reason.

When Jill compels Julian to attend school, he says one of the movie’s funniest lines. Beyond just the line itself, it is how Julian Hilliard delivers the line that makes the audience laugh. On the other hand, Beck Bennett’s character Nick gets preoccupied with a system of water filtration that eliminates the chlorine content from his pool water. Nick keeps drinking the water without chlorine.

The movie mocks the nonsensical actions of its upper-middle-class characters, especially the ridiculous amount of effort they would put in to maintain their image. Greener Grass may be the most unconventional film that delivers this message: One’s idea of being perfect is another’s prison. The film delivers it through moments such as the one where two mouths with braces swap spit until someone realizes that they have the wrong hubby. With those kinds of moments, Greener Grass comes across as an offbeat and cathartically gross comedy.

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