The Joneses (2010)

The Joneses arrives with a premise that any marketing department would recognize as a threat: a family of stealth marketers planted in an upscale subdivision, their marriage fictional, their children rented, their kitchen stocked by vendors who expect a return. Derrick Borte, making his debut, keeps the tone dry and the frame tidy. David Duchovny plays Steve, the newest member of the unit, a man hired to be likable and discovering he is rather good at it. Demi Moore's Kate runs the operation with a clipboard and an unreadable expression. The suburban lawns are immaculate. The product placement is the plot.

Credit where it is due. The film understands that the consumer economy runs on dissatisfaction, and it builds its escalation on that insight. Steve learns to sell boredom back to bored men. The neighbors begin restocking their lives around whatever the Joneses happen to own. When Larry, Steve's closest friend in the community, kills himself over credit card debt, the satire stops smirking and lands a punch. It is a bleak and effective beat, and it carries the film's whole argument in a single image.

The surrounding ledger, however, is close to empty. The cast is uniformly white, the women are decorative or managerial by turns, and the film has no interest in anything beyond the cul-de-sac. Kate's authority is a job description, not a statement. A gag involving Mick's pass at a male classmate earns him a black eye and the audience a shrug. There is no environment to save, no history to rewrite, no body that is not aspirational. The result is a lean, chilly satire of appetite, effective within its narrow lane and incurious about everything outside it.