'Greener Grass' film review: Wickedly sharp, absurd comedy satirizes life in the suburbs
With its color saturation cranked up all the way, the dark comedy "Greener Grass" (opening in select cities and on demand Oct. 18) takes coveting the banalities of suburban life to a nightmarish, hyperbolic degree.
In short: Best friends Jill (Jocelyn DeBoer) and Lisa (Dawn Luebbe) engage in a subtle rivalry between neighbors that quickly escalates, consuming more and more of their lives. Beck Bennett, Neil Casey and Dot-Marie Jones also star.
In tone and tenor, this surreal, postmodern comedy would be perfectly at home on Adult Swim, alongside "Too Many Cooks" or "Unedited Footage of a Bear." What starts as a seemingly prosaic exchange between soccer moms quickly spirals into the absurd - starting with Jill giving Lisa her newborn daughter. She just hands over little Madison, seemingly on a whim, with Lisa just becoming the baby's new mom right then and there, within the movie's first five minutes. "Grass" lets the audience know upfront that it's ridiculous, and it's only gets more warped.
Co-writers/directors DeBoer and Luebbe haven't merely created a movie that's weird for the sake of being weird, the filmmakers maintain a grip on the film's skewed tone that is in perfect step with its biting take on suburban life. Yes, the film gets bizarre - with its psycho stalker killer b-plot and willingness to put corrective lenses on a dog - but even its most absurdist humor seems totally normal in this warped neighborhood. Everything is just off-kilter enough, from the uncomfortably high number of parents wearing adult braces to the fact that everyone drives golf carts rather than cars, to make its nonsensical plot turns seem somehow plausible.
The increasingly WTF nature of "Grass" pales in comparison to the absurdity of Jill and Lisa's grossly misplaced priorities and anxieties. Every character in this bedroom community smiles through clenched teeth, boasting of their mundane successes, while willfully repressing a disappointment that underlies their lives. Jill and Lisa put on a veneer of idyllic lives, endlessly striving the impress their neighbors and living in fear of judgement. And just below the exaggerated silliness of "Grass" is a sinister psychological horror edge that takes aim at how easily so-called friends and neighbors covet, undermine, one-up and criticize.
Final verdict: DeBoer and Luebbe's directorial debut is a hysterical, acerbic swipe at the pettiness and shallow aspects of aspiration affluence. This dark comedy is destined to be one of the cult favorites of 2019.
Score: 4.5/5
"Greener Grass" screened at the Tacoma Film Festival and Orcas Island Film Festival and opens in select cities and on demand Oct. 18. This dark comedy is unrated and has a running time of 95 minutes.
