Greener GrassQuestion: How many times do you need to keep telling the same joke before it gets funny? Answer: If you have to keep telling the joke to try to make it funny, chances are it wasn't all that funny to begin with. Greener Grass is a "comedy" about a Stepford-esque housewife named Jill Davies (Jocelyn DeBoer) who experiences an existential crisis (of the most two-dimensional sort) after she gives her infant baby to her insecure friend, Lisa (Dawn Luebbe). Then, her son, Julian (Julian Hilliard), transforms into a golden retriever by falling into a pool, and she ends up divorcing her equally vapid husband, Nick (Beck Bennett)--who is obsessed with drinking pool water--based solely on a sideways suggestion made by one of her recently divorced friends named Kim Ann (Mary Holland). Gee, ain't life wacky?
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Greener Grass is written and directed by DeBoer and Luebbe, and is like a Mad Magazine version of The Stepford Wives, where the residents of this community that is seemingly trapped in the 1950s all conform to assorted social conventions for inexplicable reasons, even those which seem detrimental to their welfare. There are copious odd details which should serve to offer insight into these characters or the world in which they inhabit, but turn out to be nothing more than affectations. The most obvious example of these is how every character (except maybe infants, I'm not sure) all wear braces, despite having perfectly straight teeth. You would think that there is some deeper meaning behind the ubiquitous braces, but no. The best justification for this--and many others, like why everyone in town only drives golf carts--is that maybe someone popular did it once, and before long, everyone was doing it and stopped asking why. This would make more sense if everyone was like Jill or Lisa, who each in their own respective ways have low self-esteem and are compelled to conform. But many others in the town do not seem to exhibit this anxiety--such as another one of Jill's "friends" named Marriott (Janicza Bravo), who in reality spends most of her time looking down on Jill. There is a shadow of a caricature of suburbia in Greener Grass, but it is played to such an absurd and nonsensical degree that it is almost completely unrecognizable as to whether DeBoer and Luebbe really have anything to say about conformity or anything else of value. Sometimes someone makes an odd comment or there's a strange event, and the movie seems to slow down as though something ominous was happening, or like this saccharine veneer was being stripped away for a moment...and then nothing happens. There is a hint that something foul is afoot in this unnamed little village, or about its occupants, but it only goes as far as a hint. Take for instance when Lisa decides to go get a haircut to brighten her mood; her hair bleeds, and another barber sweeps up bloody hair from an earlier customer. Astute viewers would take this to suggest that there is something biologically different about not just Lisa, but everyone else in this community. Except...Greener Grass does nothing with this detail; it's forgotten as soon as the wacky/disturbing scene is over. There is no deeper understanding of Lisa or the world she lives in, except that it's weird for its own sake--and that's not clever, it's just one of far too many head scratchers in this movie which is played for nothing more than a cheap laugh.
What Greener Grass really feels like is an overly long Saturday Night Live comedy sketch that is convinced that the longer it stretches out, the more it surely has to say. Perhaps it's unsurprising that much of the cast is comprised of comedians who happen to have performed on SNL, but all this does is add a meaningless patina of subtext to an already shallow brand of humor. Every scene seems to be more concerned about being silly and odd instead of telling a real story. There is a meandering (and ultimately, unsatisfying) subplot about a grocery store bagger who has killed a yoga teacher (and "ex-girlfriend"!) and is on the loose. The film deliberately conceals the killer's identity so that it can shoehorn in a couple of scenes with the killer for some kind of unearned "reveal" near the end that, honestly, just doesn't matter. There is a lingering sense that Jill is "awakening" to the weirdness of her town all around her, even if at no other time than when she flees town (by way of golf cart) and is confronted with the "real world" outside of it. Except the problem is that even in the "real world", there are still the same kind of silly news broadcasts played seriously about the "bagger killer" that snuffs out any suggestion that Jill's community is just some kind of--I don't know--weird sociological experiment gone awry or something. No...somehow it's still just a part of the "real world" in Greener Grass, which is annoying as a viewer, since we can see that the rest of the world isn't afflicted with the kind of mass neurosis that Jill's town experiences. So "why" becomes the constant question which Greener Grass never satisfactorily answers. Bad movies have always been a constant, particularly those which emphasize a certain "style" at the expense of logic, or are more concerned with how they look than what they are trying to say. Some of the more notorious examples include Myra Breckenridge and Leonard Part 6, with so many more in between and beyond, where it seemed that no one bothered to step up to tell the people making it just how bad it was until it was too late. It even lacks the "so bad, it's good" charm of movies like Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which manages to elevate those stinkers into the pantheon of cult moviedom. But what makes Greener Grass so frustrating is that it does touch on compelling themes like the illusory comforts of conformity or that feeling you get that all of your friends are only really your friends because you constantly need to appease them, and that's because you suffer from low self-esteem in the first place. But instead of treating these very real human concerns in any kind of a meaningful or sensitive way, the movie constantly uses the crutch of weirdness and absurdity as a cop out--be it by way of the peculiar costumes and set design, to the rampant displays of odd behavior that would only look like something in real life if you squinted. Even some of the movie's most irrelevant scenes--like when Lisa takes her family to get their photos taken--feels like SNL cutting room floor content, and doesn't speak at all to any greater truths; it's there just to keep us chuckling at the awkwardness of it all. So by the time the credits roll for Greener Grass, any sense of revelation that Jill--or the film's audience--might have gleaned feels as shallow as the town Jill lives in...if you want to call that living at all.
Recommended for: Fans of a weird, pastel-drenched oddity that unsuccessfully equates strangeness with comedy...if anyone could really be a fan of that at all, I mean. Greener Grass is so jumbled and confused that the only people who I think would enjoy this would be people who are satisfied with little more than a bunch of meaningless bright colors and silliness, and can somehow look past the arbitrarily placed moments of dread that fail to really say what they mean. In short, this movie might only be palatable for the same kind of characters which the movie is about in the first place--and thank God that they're fictional!
What Greener Grass really feels like is an overly long Saturday Night Live comedy sketch that is convinced that the longer it stretches out, the more it surely has to say. Perhaps it's unsurprising that much of the cast is comprised of comedians who happen to have performed on SNL, but all this does is add a meaningless patina of subtext to an already shallow brand of humor. Every scene seems to be more concerned about being silly and odd instead of telling a real story. There is a meandering (and ultimately, unsatisfying) subplot about a grocery store bagger who has killed a yoga teacher (and "ex-girlfriend"!) and is on the loose. The film deliberately conceals the killer's identity so that it can shoehorn in a couple of scenes with the killer for some kind of unearned "reveal" near the end that, honestly, just doesn't matter. There is a lingering sense that Jill is "awakening" to the weirdness of her town all around her, even if at no other time than when she flees town (by way of golf cart) and is confronted with the "real world" outside of it. Except the problem is that even in the "real world", there are still the same kind of silly news broadcasts played seriously about the "bagger killer" that snuffs out any suggestion that Jill's community is just some kind of--I don't know--weird sociological experiment gone awry or something. No...somehow it's still just a part of the "real world" in Greener Grass, which is annoying as a viewer, since we can see that the rest of the world isn't afflicted with the kind of mass neurosis that Jill's town experiences. So "why" becomes the constant question which Greener Grass never satisfactorily answers. Bad movies have always been a constant, particularly those which emphasize a certain "style" at the expense of logic, or are more concerned with how they look than what they are trying to say. Some of the more notorious examples include Myra Breckenridge and Leonard Part 6, with so many more in between and beyond, where it seemed that no one bothered to step up to tell the people making it just how bad it was until it was too late. It even lacks the "so bad, it's good" charm of movies like Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which manages to elevate those stinkers into the pantheon of cult moviedom. But what makes Greener Grass so frustrating is that it does touch on compelling themes like the illusory comforts of conformity or that feeling you get that all of your friends are only really your friends because you constantly need to appease them, and that's because you suffer from low self-esteem in the first place. But instead of treating these very real human concerns in any kind of a meaningful or sensitive way, the movie constantly uses the crutch of weirdness and absurdity as a cop out--be it by way of the peculiar costumes and set design, to the rampant displays of odd behavior that would only look like something in real life if you squinted. Even some of the movie's most irrelevant scenes--like when Lisa takes her family to get their photos taken--feels like SNL cutting room floor content, and doesn't speak at all to any greater truths; it's there just to keep us chuckling at the awkwardness of it all. So by the time the credits roll for Greener Grass, any sense of revelation that Jill--or the film's audience--might have gleaned feels as shallow as the town Jill lives in...if you want to call that living at all.
Recommended for: Fans of a weird, pastel-drenched oddity that unsuccessfully equates strangeness with comedy...if anyone could really be a fan of that at all, I mean. Greener Grass is so jumbled and confused that the only people who I think would enjoy this would be people who are satisfied with little more than a bunch of meaningless bright colors and silliness, and can somehow look past the arbitrarily placed moments of dread that fail to really say what they mean. In short, this movie might only be palatable for the same kind of characters which the movie is about in the first place--and thank God that they're fictional!