A lot more could have been done with the premise upon which The Joneses is built. The idea is clever and original: a sleeper cell of marketeers posing as an ideal nuclear family moves into an upscale suburban neighborhood. Their mission: to act as seductive models of materialist perfection, subtly provoking their neighbors into coveting their flashy, high tech products. They aren’t even actually related to one another. They are actors assembled into a “unit,” headed by Kate (Demi Moore), along with former car salesman Steve (David Duchovny) and their two “kids,” Mick (Ben Hollingsworth) and Jenn (Amber Heard). They have no occupation other than to enjoy their consumer lifestyle as publicly and conspicuously as possible. It doesn’t take long to figure out which brands they’re hawking. Their crescent driveway serves as an Audi showroom, their dinner parties resemble Betty Crocker frozen food commercials, and when they go to the hair salon, they end up selling hair products to the stylists.
Upon their arrival, they are greeted by their neighbors Larry (Gary Cole) and Summer (Glenne Headly). Summer wants to be welcoming and friendly, particularly if it gives her an edge in selling her own Avon-esque product line. Watching her launch into her awkward, rehearsed sales pitch to the Joneses, I was hard-pressed to know whether I was supposed to laugh or cry. Unfortunately, The Joneses spends a little too long reveling in the very lifestyle it means to satirize. Though it does quickly reveal that these people have flaws and yearnings that are incompatible with their objective (and could be alarming, even disturbing to anyone in the audience who isn’t in on the joke from the get-go), these character details are presented more as inconvenient liabilities than humanizing qualities.
The Joneses does succeed in illustrating how the desire for status symbols and novel possessions is unsustainable and self-defeating, but I can’t help thinking that it might have been more interesting if the title characters weren’t the protagonists. If the film had centered on Larry and Summer, the slow revelation of their new neighbors’ purpose would have been much more interesting and threatening, as it ought to be. Larry is the true embodiment of recession angst, not Steve. There was a lot of potential for this film to become a sort of inverted Truman Show, where instead of an appealing illusion built around a single genuine human individual, a group of genuine human individuals are infiltrated by a similarly appealing and dangerous influence. As nice as it is to see Duchovny and Moore again, I think I actually prefer when Jim Carrey dishes out the satire. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Comedy/Drama
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 8/10/10