GREENER GRASS (2019)
Label: Shout! Factory/IFC Midnight
Region Code: A
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 96 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 2.0 & 5.1 with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Jocelyn DeBoer & Dawn Luebbe
Cast: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe, Julian Hilliard, Neil Casey, Asher Miles, Lauren Adams
Describing Greener Grass (2019) is a difficult proposition, it's an oddball sort of film that doesn't necessarily have a coherent plot, but I can say for sure that this is some sort of pastel-colored suburban nightmare that digs into themes of community-conformity and suburban unease. At the heart of it all is a pair of demented soccer moms, Jill (Jocelyn DeBoer, Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead) and Lisa (Dawn Luebbe), who are best-friends but at the same are seemingly always trying to one-up each other to prove who is the biggest conformist to the ideals of suburban life.
Their husbands are just as weird, played by SNL's Beck Bennett and Neil Casey (Ghostbusters), both are equally weird suburban conformists, but with a long list of eccentricities, such as Bennet's character's obsession with drinking pool water, and both are a bit too fond of pastel-colored short-pants and deck shoes for my tastes.
Their husbands are just as weird, played by SNL's Beck Bennett and Neil Casey (Ghostbusters), both are equally weird suburban conformists, but with a long list of eccentricities, such as Bennet's character's obsession with drinking pool water, and both are a bit too fond of pastel-colored short-pants and deck shoes for my tastes.
The main ideas here are conformity and the surreality of the suburban experience. It's short on plot but we get plenty of strange, humorous happenings, like when during the opening soccer match Jill just up and up and gives her newborn infant to Lisa when she sees her admiring it, or later when Jill's son Julian (Julian Hilliard, Color Out of Space) transforms into a dog ... and no one seems to bat an eyelash at this, they still take him to school and carry-on like normal, although they do decide he doesn't need to be enrolled "rocket math" classes, because it now seems fairly unlikely that he will ever be an accountant.
It's such an odd film, coming off as The Stepford Wives (1974) by way of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) with just a bit of Tim Burton's suburban fairy-tale Edward Scissorhands sprinkled in. Greener Grass is a surreal, sometimes non-sequitur, satire of suburban life, and while I like it it does feel more like a series of comedy sketches than a cohesive film, but I sort of love that about it too.
Back to the strange stuff that make this such an odd but interesting film, there's the neon-colors of the houses in the neighborhood, everyone drives a golf-cart, Lisa giving birth to a soccer ball and no one is bothered by it, everyone wears teeth-straightening braces, and everyone looks so similar that the husbands accidentally lock-lips with the wrong wives, laughing at their mistake. Perhaps the most maddening things about the film is that it seems to be strange for the sake of being strange, and that's not a formula that;s gonna work for the casual viewer. My teen son walked-in and tried to watch it with about half-way through and said he just couldn't do it, that it felt like Leave It To Beaver on acid, and that's about as apt a description as could come up with.
Audio/Video: Greener Grass (2019) arrives on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory frame in the original theatrical exhibition ratio. The Easter-eggs colors are robust, but the film does have a slightly overblown softness about it, giving the film a bit of a unreal half-remembered dream quality about it. Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 2.0 and 5.1 with optional English subtitles.
This release is a bit slim on the extras, but we do get the 15-min original Greener Grass short film, 9-min of deleted scenes, 6-min of TV interstitials and a 2-min trailer for the film. I would have loved a commentary from directors Jocelyn DeBoer, and Dawn Luebbe, or a behind-the-scenes featurette about creating this suburban wacky world.
The 2-disc DVD and Blu-ray arrives in a standard keepcase with a sleeve of artwork featuring the original movie poster and a scene from the film displayed landscape on the reverse side of the wrap, each of the discs inside features an image from the film.
Special Features:
- Original Greener Grass Short Film (15 min)
- Deleted Scenes (9 min)
- TV Interstitials (6 min)
- Theatrical Trailer (2 min)
- Deleted Scenes (9 min)
- TV Interstitials (6 min)
- Theatrical Trailer (2 min)
If you're into quirky satire and surreal suburban strangeness I can promise plenty of both with Greener Grass (2019). What I cannot promise a coherent plot or traditional storytelling, but I found this strange brew delightful in it's exaggerated absurdness.