Green­er Grass

There’s some­thing strange about this sun­ny, seem­ing­ly per­fect Amer­i­can sub­urb. Adults wear braces on their teeth, dri­ve golf carts and wear co-ordi­nat­ed out­fits of pink, pur­ple and blue. Writ­ten, direct­ed by and star­ring Joce­lyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, Green­er Grass sits some­where between satire and surrealism.

The incit­ing inci­dent comes as Jill (DeBoer) and Lisa (Luebbe) watch their chil­dren play soc­cer. After lament­ing the mur­der of a local yoga teacher, Lisa admires Jill’s new baby. Eager to please, Jill impul­sive­ly hands over the baby as a gift.

The intrigue and motor of Green­er Grass comes from the ques­tion of how much these serene automa­tons have in com­mon with actu­al humans. While The Step­ford Wives is an obvi­ous source of com­par­i­son, in this sub­urb the pres­sure is less about gen­der con­for­mi­ty and more about hav­ing learned a patho­log­i­cal polite­ness while true feel­ings flail out of reach.

Jill has regrets about hand­ing over her baby – an event which pre­cip­i­tates the col­lapse of her entire life – but is too polite to insist on its return, espe­cial­ly as Lisa acts offend­ed when­ev­er she broach­es the subject.

An eerie and ever-present John Car­pen­ter-esque elec­tron­ic score by Samuel Nobles amps up the sense of alien­ation and melan­choly, under­cut­ting per­for­mances that are sin­cere­ly pitched in their accep­tance of absurd goings on. There are no winks to cam­era, just peo­ple doing their best with­in a world where only sur­face com­mu­ni­ca­tion flies, even when fever­ish eyes tell a dif­fer­ent story.

DeBoer excels in the lead role, man­ag­ing to deep­en Jill’s mania though pure­ly phys­i­cal tells as her dia­logue deliv­ery remains con­sis­tent­ly sweet and sym­pa­thet­ic. Humour and des­per­a­tion stem from the same source in this sti­fling set­ting: everyone’s inabil­i­ty to say what they mean.