Greener Grass

And Human Furniture

It’s MOM WEEK in honor of Mother’s Day, and we’ve got five days of movies in some way about motherhood. It’s about all our mothers, not just mine, for a lot of reasons for which I am in therapy, so let’s just be cool about it, okay? MOM WEEK! in celebration of the lack of rules for moms, and the recognition that a mom could look and act like anyone and anything. Which is why I am starting with the confrontational and peculiar “Greener Grass”.

“Greener Grass” begins in an anonymous town at an anonymous soccer field where two women are talking about their home lives. Jill and Lisa have a keeping-up-with-the-joneses relationship, where passive-aggressive catching up on current events is part of how an unspoken game is played. In the first scene, Jill shatters the rules by offering up her infant daughter to Lisa, who has yet to have a young girl. Lisa, freely, accepts, and the trade-off happens like two people exchanging each others’ favorite pairs of gum.

Very quickly, the viewer would spot that not all is right in this small community. “Greener Grass” takes place in the type of ‘berg you’d see in a musical specifically for only one song before cutting away. Here, we’re seeing it in between songs, where clearly everyone is broken, but in unison. Every adult wears braces and guilelessly communicates in metallic smiles. Fashions don’t vary much, they look as if they haven’t varied in forty years. You could argue these women are attempting to live a trad wife life, but more like as if no one really knew what “trad” actually meant anymore.

Jill almost immediately regrets making the transaction. At home, her seven year old boy is a little antisocial reprobate until one day, he became a golden retriever. Jill’s husband is adoring of their new dog son, but Jill immediately misses the violent little troublemaker. Cradling her new baby, meanwhile, turns Lisa askew. She begins daydreaming of being pregnant again, enough so that her magical thinking, in a way, works. In a world where magical thinking did sometimes work, I imagine we’d live a lot like these joyful, oblivious automatons, all of which seem to have never taken their Stepford bonafides out into the real world.

Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe are not only Jill and Lisa, they are the writers and directors of this particular film, and their vision is excessively specific, all glittery blue pools and verdant green bushes with pink pastel fashions. The boys in particular are all barrel-shaped goons waiting for instructions from wifey, who doubles as mom. The brilliant Beck Bennett and comedy vet Neil Casey are interchangeable as the husbands – notably, both hail from “Saturday Night Live” (Casey was a writer), as does costar John Milhiser. The excessively talented multi-hyphenate bench for this film includes Jim Cummings (I can’t wait to discuss his movies soon) and Janicza Bravo (“Zola”, and same). Look out too for small roles from ringers like D’Arcy Carden and Mary Holland. This is a movie with a vision so specific that it has to be the result of comedy veterans who respect and understand each others’ sensibilities.

“Greener Grass” happens in a world one could consider “Lynchian”, though it never goes that far, maybe intentionally and maybe not so much. This is the Lynchian suburbs of the intro/outro to “Blue Velvet”, the slow-motion waving and smiling and delirious happiness that comes from living in the land of plenty. “Greener Grass” punctures that happiness in an entirely different manner, applying magic realism that soon dovetails into tragic realism, and then flat-out delirium. These people are arrested in their ways. The movie’s subtext is hopelessness – they’ll NEVER snap out of it. To make a movie like this and keep it funny? For that alone, “Greener Grass” is the most improbable of achievements.

Keeping up with current events, I was worried a new presidency would greatly expand the carceral system. It appears as if it’s extended to literal concentration camps. People are shocked today. Though I remember being in prison and watching a State Of The Union during the first Trump presidency. He talked about keeping Guantanamo Bay, a place of illegal extraordinary rendition, open, for a period of… well, wow, he said “forever.” He referred to what was long thought to be a black eye for the criminal justice system and said it would confidently be a permanent shame. And this was met with a standing ovation. Not polite clapping, but an actual standing ovation for illegal imprisonment. One of many moments where I wondered exactly how long I had actually been in prison that the world shifted so violently.

In the above link, there’s also mention of a new ICE director who has eagerly talked up plans for mass incarceration to wealthy millionaires planning to open their own private prisons – creating a demand that ultimately must be supplied. The quote that sticks with me is when he says the expanding carceral state will be “like Amazon Prime, but for human beings,” which is pretty much as cynical and misanthropic as it gets. It brings to mind how I felt in prison many times. People know you get placed in a room or a cell and you can stay there for many years. What people don’t know is how often you can be taken from one place and brought to another. The prison can freely shift you to another bed, another room, without a warning. You can be sent to other institutions with zero explanation. In prison, you are not a human being. You are luggage. They don’t want you to be human. They just want to be free to move you whenever they’d like. And in Trump’s America, there’s gonna be an awful lot of furniture.