Greener Grass review, HeyUGuys
The best examples of surrealist cinema plunge into perturbed characters and enrich their anxiety, giving an audience for their unconscious. The more laborious specimens tend to indulge their weird world too much, and the characters become almost secondary. Greener Grass — the colourful yet aimless debut from Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe (who also star) — has a lot of discombobulating fun, wandering blindly in its bizarre neighbourhood. But it doesn’t delve deep enough into its apparently contented citizens to hold our attention for long.
For me, the surreal experience is always a preferable one. For the first twenty minutes or so, it’s a thrill to simply embrace the madness. The grownups all wear braces, everyone drives around in golf buggies, and children can morph into Golden Retrievers without many, if any, questions. When soccer mum Jill (DeBoer) is watching her boy play badly on the pitch, she, out of nowhere, smiles and offers her friend Lisa (Luebbe) her newborn baby (‘do you want her?’). And Lisa accepts. Simple as that. But, before long, this leads Jill into a delayed spiral of guilt and doubt that takes too long to push to anywhere interesting.
