Greener Grass is a 2019 comedy about suburban soccer moms who find themselves constantly competing against each other in their personal lives.
On a pleasant sunshiny day, the locals are gathered to watch the kids play a game of soccer. In the stands, mothers Jill Davies (Jocelyn DeBoer) and Lisa Wetbottom (Dawn Luebbe) sit in brightly colored dresses watching, Jill cradling a newborn baby. Lisa suddenly notices the child and compliments her friend on the addition to her family. Taken by her sincerity, Jill then offers the little girl to Lisa, who openly accepts. Jill hands Madison, who is renamed Paige, over and that’s that, a daughter is traded. Back home, Jill’s husband Nick (Beck Bennett) wishes she’d asked him first, but he’s having enough trouble getting their young son (Julian Hilliard) to catch a ball. Things are all out of sorts. Meanwhile, a grocery bagger is on a murderous rampage. Such is life in rural suburbia.
If all that sounds a little odd, that’s the point, DeBoer and Luebbe – co-writers and co-directors of Greener Grass – are on a mission to unleash a maddening flurry of weirdness in their evisceration of life on the outskirts of Middle America. That means everyone lives in a kind of twisted Tim Burton version of Edward Scissorhands, if that’s even possible, where all the adults have braces, wear pastel colors, drive golf carts, and fawn over each in superficial ways, each as phoney as the plastic flowers ‘growing’ all about the neighborhood.
Naturally, despite it’s comical overtones, it’s in fact a jarring vision of an American nightmare where anything is possible because there are no rules except that everything must get weirder. Imagine a child feeling hopelessly disconnected from his parents, falling into a pool and emerging as a dog, only to be more accepted (dog’s catch balls very well). Or a woman stuffing a soccer ball under her dress and convincing everyone that she’s having a baby – even after it’s born. Or a few seconds of a show called ‘Kids With Knives’ permanently ruining the child watching. You see where this is going. These are just some of the oddities in the mix, and depending on your state of mind, will be either very, very funny or entirely out of reach.
Obviously, there’s plenty of scathing commentary on tap in DeBoer and Luebbe’s wickedly sharp script, one that would seem destined to deflate in minutes but instead constantly finds ways to stay not only interesting but downright gripping. It’s impossible not to watch and wonder what will happen next. That’s primarily because of how committed the cast is in bringing these decidedly dark characters to life. Both DeBoer and Luebbe are fun to watch while Beck, Neil Casey, D’Arcy Carden, and others go to extremes. They absolutely sell the hell out it. It’s absurd … at first. Then funny. Then a little uncomfortable. Then chilling. And finally, traumatic.
I’m a sucker for experimental movies where filmmakers take risks. Greener Grass takes big ones. It never goes so far as to leave you feeling out of the loop, but you always feel like it wants to. That’s a thin line to tread upon and more so, one where it could teeter and stumble at any moment. There’s a freedom in that that I suspect DeBoer and Luebbe knew was always there, pushing themselves to skirt around the edge of lunacy in discovering just how far they could go. They go far. You should go with them.