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This article was published 27/10/2017 (3260 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a man of doggedly liberal bent, George Clooney is a guy who likes to make a statement when he directs movies.

The Monuments Men posited that, even in the killing fields of wartime, art was worth saving. The Ides of March was about idealism struggling in the realm of dirty politics. Good Night and Good Luck was about journalism serving as a bulwark against authoritarian extremism in American life.

In his new film Suburbicon, Clooney had the opportunity to let his hair down and have stylistic fun with a long unproduced, three-decades-languishing script by Joel and Ethan Coen, featuring murder, treachery and kink in an unlikely setting of wholesome, white-picket-fence 1950s America.

That kind of story has its own subversive kick, as any fan of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet will tell you. But Clooney takes a heavy hand with it and adds an element of docu-drama that doesn’t… quite… fit.

The Suburbicon of the title is a forcefully wholesome suburban development intended to reflect the Eisenhower-era riches of middle-class life: prosperity, safety and community.

But when a black family moves in, the citizens are horrified at the violation of an unspoken “whites-only” understanding. Trying to make a home, the quiet, dignified black matriarch Mrs. Meyers (Karimah Westbrook) finds herself facing pushback from her white neighbours, who inexorably start to take on the characteristics of Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

Clooney and co-screenwriter Grant Heslov add this story to the Coens’ script as backdrop. In the foreground is bespectacled ‘50s dad Gardner (Matt Damon) whose backyard is adjacent to the Meyers’. Gardner’s attitude to the controversy is that it is mere distraction. He’s got other things on his plate. His paraplegic wife (Julianne Moore) resents him for the car accident that took away the use of her legs and necessitated live-in assistance from her twin sister Margaret (also Moore).

Gardner’s young son Nicky (Noah Jupe) quietly observes the tension, until one night, his dad wakes him up so that he can join the rest of the family in the clutches of a sinister pair of home invaders. Nicky — and the audience — may be mystified by the scary intrusion that ultimately claims the life of Nicky’s mom. And it’s not until a scene in a police lineup where we put two and two together regarding the true nature of the crime, putting Nicky in particular in imminent danger.

At times, it really feels like a Coen brothers effort, albeit one the bros might not have taken on since it bears too much similarity in plot and tone to Fargo. It has a dazzling cast of eccentric supporting players. (Oscar Isaac is a stand-out as a sleazy insurance investigator whose professional standards run akin to Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.) Its production values and musical score are top-notch.

It also feels weirdly timely. The film was shot around the same time Donald Trump was winning the White House, and it seems Clooney has deliberately fashioned a response to Trump’s slogan of Make America Great Again, suggesting this epoch of white-male dominance is precisely the “greatness” to which Trump and his minions ascribe. At the same time, its plot mirrors Trump’s playbook: Draw the attention of the populace with a race-baiting (take a knee, anyone?) and you might just get away with murder.

Still, the movie just doesn’t succeed in overcoming an incurable tonal rift between the serious story (in fact, the racial component was based on real events in Levittown, Pa. in 1957) and the Coens’ dark farce.

It’s frustrating. But good intentions do not a good movie make.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing