My wife and I went to an advance screening of a new movie called The Joneses. It was a funny yet dark and subtle social commentary on materialism. David Duchovny and Demi Moore are a couple that move into a giant fancy house in an uber-nice, gated suburb neighborhood. Their two kids (played by Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth) are modelesque and they all seem like the perfect, happy and oh-so good looking family. Dad spends his days down at the golf course and mom gets manicured and hangs with the ladies. The film starts off giving you the neighbors’ eye view of this new family. Then it becomes subtly apparent that this family is a plant. They’re fooling everyone around them, but the movie viewer gets privy to meetings with the head sales rep, who comes to visit the family and evaluate how the family is doing with sales. Due to the husband’s influence at the golf course and his flashiness, his sales of company-sponsored products goes up about 3%. The wife gets into the low teens with her slick manipulation of the other housewives in the area and their fixation with looking beautiful. But the two high schoolers top the others with their influence on their peers at school, who all want the latest skateboards, gadgets and gaming gear or makeup, clothing and accessories.
Tension is brought into the household by the people playing the characters (Duchovny and Moore) not agreeing on how the roles mingle with real life. In other words, Duchovny has the hots for Moore, who insists on keeping their fake marriage strictly business for appearances. There’s a gratuitous sex scene early on that underscores the teenage daughter’s problem with lust and security. As the fake family starts to crack under the pressure, Duchovny tries to hold it together, but he’s the rookie in the outfit (having just been hired on as his first husband role) and gets shouted down by the veteran mom.
The film is almost evangelistic in nature. Or perhaps “pastoral” would be the more appropriate tag. You see, the sly social commentary on the vacuousness of materialism is lit up on screen for a glaring and a tiny bit uncomfortable examination. If but for the humor, it might come off preachy. While certainly not a churchy film (nudity and multiple use of the f-word will usually keep that idea far away), this film could aid in ripping the bandage off the consumeristic/materialistic wound from our culture – kind of like how The Stepford Wives took society’s popular views on women and their roles at the time and played out those views to their logical and twisted conclusion so as to expose them as sick.
Kudos to the team behind this film for amplifying the very surface they’re diving under. If I were their art/film professor, they’d get an A.
Comments