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Best of frenemies … Greener Grass
Best of frenemies … Greener Grass
Best of frenemies … Greener Grass

Greener Grass review – weird, deadpan satire of sunny suburbia

This article is more than 4 years old

A soccer mom casually gives away her baby to an admiring neighbour in a comedy with echoes of The Stepford Wives

Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe are LA comedy actors and veterans of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre improv group who are now jointly making their feature debut as writer-director-stars of this elaborately deadpan suburbia satire inhabited by squeaky-clean people with hints of Stepford and Todd Solondz. The title might lead you to think that it is all about envy – the gnawing torment that your neighbours’ lawn is lusher, their SUV bigger etc – but it’s not, or not exactly.

DeBoer and Luebbe play Jill and Lisa, two best frenemies and competitive stay-at-home soccer moms whose husbands do the breadwinning; they live in a manicured little community where people drive around in golf carts. Jill has a strange need to please people, so when Lisa says that Jill’s new baby is adorable, Jill impulsively offers it to her and Lisa accepts.

This weird glassy-eyed trade, accepted as perfectly normal by everyone involved but gradually regretted by Jill like a sleepwalker beginning to wake up, colours the rest of the movie with an air of surreal ghastliness. Strange hallucinatory things happen, semi-symbolic metamorphoses occur, and Jill begins to lose her sheen of perfectness.

Of course, there’s a fish-in-a-barrel quality to this movie’s targets and, as with so much satire, I suspected that “weird” is easier than “funny”. But this grew on me. There is something startling about the TV shows that the children are watching, including a daytime adventure called Kids With Knives, and I liked Jill’s horrified reaction to her stroppy and incontinent child Julian (Julian Hillard) who bizarrely shrieks: “Mom’s a school! ‘I’m mom, full of rooms and clocks!’”

It creates its own unwholesome self-enclosed Percocet aesthetic, and perhaps this is a film for America’s contemporary opioid culture.

Greener Grass is released in the UK on 22 November.

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