Greener Grass is completely brilliant at what it does. There aren’t many other ways to get this across without spoiling the film. The brainchild (brainchildren?) of directors and actresses Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe has a loose story, but Greener Grass is really an experience brewed from the organic roasted snapshots of suburbia. An absurdist satire on hyper-politeness marinated with envy that so permeates our, and in bold emphasis, white American society.
To give you a scenario that stabs at reality as the film opens: the protagonist trades away her newborn baby based on a comment, and finds her other son transformed into a dog. But of course from there the situations become ever more perverse. Even though everything is clearly caving in around the protagonist, she and her cohort remain hopelessly entrenched in a fixed role, far beyond rescue. And perhaps in a sick, metaphysical way, they ARE the boundaries: it is physically impossible to step out of bounds no matter how poignant the reminder, or however hard they try.
Even in the Q&A after the film, I wasn’t sure if the directors were completely out of character yet. The over eagerness belies some type of dysfunction that you just know isn’t normal nor wholesome. As George Carlin used to point out about one American aphorism: how can anyone be “more than happy”? Perhaps more pressingly: what happens to your life if you must always be happy? It is the symptom of the Facebook and Instagram generation (regardless of age), cheapening our values into superficial facades that you can rent, buy, sell and promote. Greener Grass doesn’t pretend it has a reply, or a solution. But it does paint a 70 foot tall picture of that farce so one cannot fail to see the laughable and meaningless corners we drive ourselves into.