Brace Yourself for Greener Grass, the Most Awkward Comedy of the Year

Jim Sharman’s midnight movie masterpiece The Rocky Horror Picture Show famously opens on a pair of disembodied lips singing “Science Fiction/Double-Feature.” They’re rich, vividly red, luscious and sexual, altogether supernaturally seductive as they croon against a black background; after 44 years of cult worship, the sequence remains indelible. Greener Grass, a new, agonizing black comedy by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, kicks off with a similar image, but the lips are a garish pink and they aren’t singing. Instead, they’re twitching under the strain of a forced smile as the credits roll atop them.
The lips belong to Jill (DeBoer), who has just passed guardianship of her newborn baby to her bestie Lisa (Luebbe); Jill’s the generous type, rich in children and all too happy to share the wealth. It’s the first inexplicable and nauseating mistake she, and every other character in the story for that matter, makes, a clumsy yank on the skein that starts her slow unraveling over the movie’s duration. Turns out that Jill loves her baby quite a lot, and that, despite her husband Nick (Beck Bennett) and their older son Julian (Julian Hilliard), she’s hopelessly alone. Likely Jill doesn’t register her loneliness because she’s hopelessly vapid, too, again not unlike everyone else in the movie: In American suburbs, people keep their friends close and their frenemies closer while engaging in social arms races and cataloguing the petty grievances in their candy-coated lives.
Greener Grass is a comedy of manners where the comedy catches in the throat like fish bones. The only decent person in the movie is actually a dog, who is actually Julian, who magically transforms into a dog (to Jill’s horror and Nick’s delight). Julian’s the nonconformist in their midst, falling short of cultural mores because he’s a complete weirdo who’d rather bang incoherent noise on piano keys at a recital than play “Yankee Doodle” like all of his classmates. (Good for Julian.) The “why” and “how” of his canine metamorphosis is never revealed, but it is perhaps explained by DeBoer and Luebbe’s Upright Citizens Brigade background. Improv is the art of saying “yes, and …” so it fits that Greener Grass is a “yes, and …” movie, 90 minutes of thoroughly bizarre premises no one questions or balks at but instead, dive into with absurdist gusto.