In this delightfully strange suburban comedy by sketch veterans Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, adults with perfectly straight teeth wear braces, kids surface from swimming pools as dogs, golf carts replace cars, leading to passive-aggressive junction encounters. Television advertisements suggest parents to chew their food and spit it out for babies to eat in order to avoid the devil that is cutlery. There’s plenty more bizarre ideas in this ultra-strong psychedelic cannabis trip, and you’ll be laughing from all the madness.
The absurdity of suburbia
The core of this surrealist suburban narrative follows two soccer moms, played by the filmmakers, who engage in a cold war with each other to essentially achieve the best version of the American dream. They have nice houses, charming husbands (terrifically played by Beck Bennett and Neil Casey) and live in an insular area, away from America’s bigger problems – the final hurdle is to nurture the potential of their young children into gifted and talented individuals.
Kids are both prized possessions and prizes. Jill (DeBoer) politely hands over her newborn to Lisa (Luebbe), a decision she soon regrets when her other child Julian (Julian Hilliard, young Luke in The Haunting of Hill House) proves to be a bigger disappointment on the field than Fernando Torres when he played for Chelsea. In a blackly comic karmic act for falling below his parent’s expectations, Julian transforms into a golden retriever.
At the same time, Lisa gets pregnant with a soccer ball and there’s a psychotic yoga teacher killer stalking the locals. If this phantasmagoric satire doesn’t sound appealing by now then I can’t help you because the directing duo go deep, filling every inch of the day-glo-tinted mise-en-scene with recognisable yet peculiar details to lampoon the image of American suburbia, particularly from the perspective of women, drawing on their own experience of growing up there and observing the oddities of the very particular, middle-class environment.
Great promising directors
In a post-screening Q&A, the filmmakers aptly described the balance of the rich aesthetic and indie production values as “champagne taste on a beer budget.” It’s a successful endeavor, for they achieve a universal, timeless look – unbound by any certain time period or part of the USA – through shrewd costume design, a soundtrack inspired by the past half millennium of American cinema and excellent compositions.
The visuals are a formalist roundabout, with striking uses of symmetry, close-ups, zooms and blocking that maximises humour out of each tableau, prodding you to examine each frame closely for subtle jokes and thereby appreciating the film with the special quality of rewatchability.
At the centre of an amazing cast, which includes entertaining performances from Asher Miles Fallica as Lisa’s tyrannical son Bob and D’Arcy Carden as nonplussed teacher Miss Human, are the formidable duo of DeBoer and Luebbe, who are by turns blissful, sardonic and poignant but always amusing. I’m excited for what they’ll conjure next as they present evidence of limitless imagination and bold creativity. As alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade (the comedy breeding ground founded by Amy Poehler and friends), they’re the latest breakouts in a long line of top talents.
A little vignette-y
Greener Grass was originally conceived as a short film, narratively structured as a string of vignettes. It’s origins as what was essentially a sketch comedy are transparent in this feature, both to its detriment and success. There are a handful of sequences that leave you with an ellipsis, not quite hitting the mark of comedy or biting satire as they intend to, nor entirely sufficing as plot or character development.
However, every out-there element can be connected to a real facet of suburban life at its most transgressive, whether it’s an outlandish life hack or a health fad (Jill’s husband drinks pool water). The dystopia is made familiar because it’s grounded in an archetypal understanding of the people and places that make up the affluent districts as we know them, maybe from first-hand experience or maybe from watching Pleasantville, Modern Family, American Beauty, et al. It might just be hysterically close to the bone for anyone who’s lived in the American suburbs.
Greener Grass: Conclusion
DeBoer and Luebbe have spun a wonderfully weird yarn that both fulfils a niche and appeals to a mainstream comedy audience, for it coats the surrealistic sensibilities of John Waters, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Luis Buñuel with SNL humour, underlined by a twisted femme-centric nucleus akin to The Stepford Wives.
Whilst recalling the works of other absurdist artists, the duo’s bricolage still manages to be bracingly original. Greener Grass could only have been made from their minds – it’s hilariously unique and uniquely hilarious.
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