Greener Grass: A Film Founded Upon Comedic Gimmicks

Kaycie Santiago
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Greener Grass is an American Comedy film directed by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe. In their directorial debuts, they crafted a surrealist and absurdist film which characterizes modern suburbia in a bizarre manner. Through this pastel, slightly sun-bleached rendering, the viewer is whisked into a world in which adults wear braces on their already straight teeth, everyone drives golf carts, and their children have the capacity to miraculously transform into golden retrievers. Greener Grass hilariously generates discomfort which prevails through the film with the use of close-up shots. These shots present the mouths and facial expressions of characters in a way that is almost too personal and leaves the viewer immersed in an awkward universe.

The film immerses the viewer within its universe by beginning with a scene in which two mothers, Jill (Jocelyn DeBoer) and Lisa (Dawn Luebbe), two suburban mothers, watch their children play a school soccer game from the sidelines. As they engage in conversation, Lisa coons over the beauty of Jill’s infant, Madison. To establish the comedic nature of the film, Jill forgets about her baby’s existence and cheerfully offers her child to Lisa. When Lisa immediately accepts, Greener Grass becomes a comedy which is unlike many cinematic works within this genre. Through the use of a stoic and stifled performance, DeBoer and Luebbe carry the film on its shoulders.

As the film progresses, Lisa attempts to take over every single aspect of Jill’s life. In doing so, she first claims Madison as her own by renaming her Paige. This serves to integrate Paige as a part of Jill’s family and makes Paige a symbol of the deep seated conflict that exists within their frenemy dynamic. While this conflict alone would create a film with a centralized story line, the film deviates from this when it implements a subplot involving a psychotic yoga teacher who shakes the suburb’s residents by murdering a grocery store clerk. This greatly affects the residents when the crime occurs in a grocery store, an establishment central to the suburban nuclear family. However, it is not necessarily a part of Lisa’s effort to adopt aspects of Jill’s life as her own. In the midst of this, Lisa and Jill fight for acceptance in a world which appears indifferent to their struggle. This significantly lowers the stakes of their struggle and damages the film’s overall quality.

Greener Grass also incorporates strange tidbits which push the film forward in the midst of a decentralized story. For instance, Jill’s husband, Nick (Beck Bennett), finds himself hilariously attracted to the taste of pool water and Lisa discovers that she is pregnant with a soccer ball. These unexpected developments add to the film’s comedic value but it fails to contribute to a viewer’s emotional investment in the plight of the characters.

Overall, the scenes resemble comedic sketches which utilize dead-pan humor through the use of a sardonic and absurdist qualities. While the scenes are tied together in this way, it makes the events difficult to follow. This structure also complicates the viewer’s ability to correlate the film’s developments to the frenemy relationship between Jill and Lisa.

While the many of the scenes made me chuckle at its oddness, the execution of Greener Grass’s foundational story left me dissatisfied. The incongruity of the film’s events, to a limited extent, convinces the viewer to continue watching. While the film’s uniqueness may elevate this to a cult-classic, there is little reason for one to view this beyond the entertainment value it provides in its comedic gimmicks.

Kaycie Santiago

Written by

I dabble in film and history.

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