Suburban Madness is made in the style of the tv show Desperate Housewives: a narrator and a lot of talk about relationships and suburban family life and based on the true story of Clara Harris, a Houston Texas dentist who ran over her husband three times with a car.

Bobbi Bacha (Sela Ward) runs the Blue Moon Agency, a private investigator service dedicated to find out cheaters. It's also her, with a thick southern accent, who does the occasional narrations of doom throughout the film, telling us that there's no point in thinking we'd ever be able to achieve marital bliss. It's just not meant to be.

Bobbi and her daughter Jessie James (April Mullen) are hired to follow Lisa Singer (Kate Greenhouse), a divorcee whose ex-husband wants proof that she is having an affair with the man's friend's wife. (Of course, being men, those two husbands are just out to get some girl-on-girl action photos)

That same woman, Lisa, gets hired at the Harris' dentistry where she soon starts an affair with her boss, David Harris (Brett Cullen).

While it's not appropriate, it certainly isn't a surprise that David has taken up with his new receptionist: at home, his former beauty queen wife who now looks rather frumpy, insists on having the 6-year-old twins sleep in their bed every night. At work, it's known that Clara (Elizabeth Pena) owns 51% of the business and she pays her husband a salary.

After the initial affair, Clara finds out and cleans house her way: she throws David out of the house; once she lets him back in, she has invited his parents after informing them about their sons behavior. Clara fires Lisa from the job and drags David to church where she's also already informed the pastor of her husband's indiscretion. She follows it up with some motherly behavior, ordering Dave around and praising him for basically being "a good boy" as he goes along defeated and depressed.

The film is slightly oversaturated with color and if it wasn't trying to be taken seriously, one would think Suburban Madness tries to be a comedy noir, everything, including color, a bit over-the-top. Unfortunately, the endless preaching of the narrator tells us that this film does try to be a meaningful film about relationships, divorce and cheating.

Bobbi's oh-so-hip and emancipated routine becomes tiresome after the first 20 minutes. "The casserole is in the oven" is her code when a subject she's following leaves the house. "Let's bake it" is her daughter's response.

Each time a client shows up at their office announcing "I think my husband is cheating", Bobbi immediately breaks into her speech that "of course he's cheating, all men do." At home she keeps telling her own daughters that it's just a question of time when her own (third or fourth) husband will start cheating like the previous ones and Jessie James has taken the lessons well: the first thing she tells her sister when she plans to get married is that by mother's example, she should know that it'll only end up in divorce.

Even at the coffee shop, some Sex and the City type group of women who shows up every Tuesday, bemoans the lying cheating evil guys loudly enough for Clara and the coffee shop employee to hear it.

The basic lesson of this film is: every woman gets cheated on, and every friend she's ever had can be a suspect. Men are all pigs, they are forced to "spread their seed" because they "must procreate" and you shouldn't expect to ever have a good relationship.

Then we get another lesson: once Bobbi is being screamed at by her daughter who is sickened by her mother spying on her future husband, she suddenly has the "my God, what have I done?" realization. When Clara comes to Bobbi to have her husband investigated after he announces he's going for a dinner with Lisa to "resolve some issues", Bobbi suddenly tries to talk her client out of finding out the truth because it'll "just hurt more and more". All of a sudden, "if you love somebody", you need to just suffer through it all and best not let the truth destroy you. Huh?

And don't forget, once you suspect he's cheating, you need some hip, cool-talking feminist private eye who will tell you from the start that you're doomed and should probably be in therapy rather than charge of a detective agency.

Eventually, Clara solves the problem by running her husband over with her Mercedes, backing up two more times for repeats. Hallelujah. At that point of the film, nobody with half a mind could take any more of the "everybody will get cheated on" blather, David's pathetic "please sleep with me" beggings to Lisa and Clara's overly pronounced suffering in trying to keep her man by means of liposuction and hair dye.

Oh please ... back that Mercedes up one more time.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD