The Joneses – 2009

May 14, 2010 by JT
Filed under Film Reviews

From the fairly bland title to the beautiful people that make up the cast to the cheesy tagline (“The family you can’t catch up with”), more or less everything in ‘The Joneses’ screams of your usual chick flick. Except when you actually sit down to watch it, you find out it is anything but.

It follows the story of the Jones family as they move into a new house and try to get settled in a new neighbourhood, something which proves to be quite easy: mum Kate, dad Steve and children Jenn and Mick are beautiful, friendly, trendy and rich, and they become popular straightaway. Everybody wants to be friends with them; everybody wants to copy their looks, their car, their gadgets and even their furniture. Their –apparent – perfection is coveted and envied by the whole community, creating what they call a “ripple effect”.

However, something big lurks behind the façade, and we are introduced to it quite bluntly when we’re showed the happy couple not sleeping in the same bed and when we see the daughter trying to seduce her dad; we find out that the Jones family is not actually real. It is a business project, a living, walking and talking advertisement billboard created to sell products to people by taking advantage of their feelings of inadequacy and their desire to emulate.

The film’s storyline revolves around two main themes: the damages of lying and pretending to be what you are not, and the struggle and pain that come with not accepting yourself for who you are. A different kind of ‘ripple effect’ ends up affecting both the ‘family’ and their network of friends, beginning with their neighbours, who feel increasingly more uncomfortable and distressed the more their friendship with the Joneses deepens.

The acknowledgment of their faults, flaws and failures pushes the characters into making difficult and tragic choices, while the audience is left slightly anxious and faced with a truth which society nowadays tries hard to overturn: perfection does not exist, no matter how hard you try.

This is not what you would define as the “big” film you look forward to, but it is interesting and also, entertaining, especially because the secret held by the Jones family is something both their neighbours and the audience want to know more about.

Review by Margherita Pellegrino

View the trailer