David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street is a bowl of Spielberg movie parts (ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park to name an obvious few) torn into bitesized pieces and tossed together, with a dash of Robert Zemeckis for plot dressing. Less obvious are bits of tone and detail from classic science fiction author Clifford D Simak, who liked to set one fantastic premise after another in a smalltown setting ("The Big Front Yard," Way Station).
Spielberg and Zemeckis are quick handy labels to slap on this concoction but I submit Simak is key-- not just to this picture but to much of what Spielberg (and Mitchell here) is doing. You get a patiently built-up portrait of suburban (in Simak's case rural) life, you're introduced to characters and their dynamic within the family, who in turn form relationships with the community at large. Then something happens and we're shown the characters' increasingly panicked reaction to events, the story's eventual resolution ideally a natural outgrowth of what the characters have learned along the way.
Hence Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring novelist living with her husband Greg (an unrecognizably middle-aged Ewan McGregor). Greg works as pizza delivery driver on the side, and the tension between the two-- at what Greg isn't telling Denise-- is pulling them apart; sensing this strain are children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) who huddle in their rooms listening and whispering speculations about the family's future in the dark.
Then the odd detail pops up: a three-foot stem ringed with spiky leaves and a heavy red club for a head sprouts in Mrs. Huddleston's (Anne Gee Byrd) back yard-- librarian Ms. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda) identifies this as a pleuromeia, a vegetation with sporing bulb common to the Triassic era, along the Eurasian part of the world (that a living sample was found in a Michigan back yard, along with flowers and animals from the Jurassic-- but I'm getting ahead of myself). Grumpy next-door neighbor Mel (PJ Byrne) complains to Greg that someone (likely the Platt's dog Starbuck) defecated in his yard, though the pile of feces he shows them is maybe four-five feet high weighing maybe several hundred pounds. Flashing lights and strange noises are heard throughout the night, portents of even stranger things.
The 'strange thing' could have been anything-- alien musicologists attempting contact, an alien botanist lost and trying to phone home, alien conquistadors staging a fullscale invasion (Spielberg apparently has a thing for them); little Chinese creatures snacking after midnight, a De Lorean flung back in time-- but in this particular case it's dinosaurs, pointedly Jurassic (Spielberg's OG take on the subject is mislabeled-- the T-Rex and for that matter the velociraptor are from late Cretaceous, almost 100 million years after).
But-- never mind! If the phenomenon isn't paleontologically accurate at least the characters' response to it is halfway plausible, and you appreciate how the situation helps develop and resolve and even improve the family's inner issues and standing within the community, with maybe a bit of a surprise-- pleasant in my book-- regarding the stargazing Carl Sagan-reading Audrey (she's the science nerd who helps explain what's going on). Classic '80s playbook, maybe even a recognizable page or two from Simak, whose Hiram Taine in "Big Front Yard" turns out to have all the skills at hand to deal with alien visitors, and who considers the strange landscape the front of his house has been dimensionally folded into to be just a large new extension of his yard (O, and he has a dog name Towser who's smarter and handier than any human in the story, and has been clued in to what's happening all along).
The key word in Simak's fiction is 'pastoral,' that sense of a quiet rural life momentarily ruffled by cosmic events, then brought back to a placid equilibrium after some adjustment; I submit that Spielberg and Mitchell take their cue from the Simak-adjacent word 'comfort,' showing us a familiar world, ultimately reinforcing the value of that world by temporarily threatening it.
To his credit Mitchell goes a step further than Spielberg, gives the picture its freshest spin-- the creatures here are considerably more bloodthirsty, their taste for human flesh amped up. Instead of velociraptors we have its ancestor Coelophysis, another birdlike predator depicted at its maximum estimated height (around ten feet, though it could easily be as small as three) and an implied far heavier weight (textbooks estimate them to be a maximum 45 pounds). We have the Titanoboa, an as implied by name humungous snake of the Paleocene era reportedly fifty feet long, though here it looks to be a few hundred, at one point sliding into a window and winding placidly through the Platt's house like an uninvited guest.
And of course we have the Allosaurus, the lighter sleeker predecessor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex but no less deadly, easily the apex predator of Oak Street, and the one to make the most disturbing kill-- functioning as nearly all classic predators function, taking out the weakest (emotionally if not physically) of the prey species-- the half-fossilized elder who strains hardest to uphold traditional values, and insist that nothing's wrong.
Talking apex predator, Anne Hathaway is easily the star-- the story is told mostly through her eyes, and we're most familiar with her aspirations (she's writing a novel in secret, in the hope of someday becoming a bestselling author). She's the strongest character by far and it's a bit unsettling, if not a little gratifying, to see the wife and mother view the husband and father as something of a dead weight she has considered abandoning. Oak Street's transposition (transtemporal displacement?) has helped Greg's standing some-- the family needs his superior strength and speed-- but otherwise...
As Greg, Ewan McGregor plays the role of second banana with becoming humor, driving his car with the ridiculous pizza sign strapped on top (couldn't they get a Domino's endorsement?). Maybe the movie's biggest flaw is his big secret, which fools no one and serves no real purpose except to drive the necessary wedge between him and his wife-- when you're the breadwinner and suddenly you take on pizza delivery for extra cash, shouldn't everyone reasonably guess that something's happened at work?
Mitchell ends the film with a bit of a happy flourish (skip this paragraph if you plan to see the picture!), neatly stitching the conclusion of Back to the Future to this otherwise unhappy narrative-- if you're going to drag in time travel you might as well introduce causal paradoxes and ignore logical conundrums. Yes that final bit doesn't make sense-- but boy didn't it feel good? Wasn't it emotionally satisfying after the gut punch of a family cruelly divided (tho Hathaway's Denise suddenly standing bolt upright watching the Allosaurus feed, then wordlessly walking away, was a brutal and startlingly honest detail), and didn't you enjoy the TV footage of all those neighbors singing Denise' praise ("But what happened to the Tuckers?!" a faint voice pipes up in your head. "Did Denise-- or most likely Brian-- deliberately abandon them? Isn't that harsh retribution for the bit of bullying that they apologized for?!")?
Comfort and a dash of escapism, with the disturbing parts kicked up a notch-- I suspect Simak would flinch at the extra hgore, but otherwise approve. As for Spielberg-- if you like his movies this is for you; if you like his movies too much I guess you can always play your prized copy of Jurassic Park or ET (in glorious VHS!) instead. I'm what you might call the skeptical casual follower and occasional admirer, so this works just fine-- arguably works even better than the 'Berg's own Disclosure Day; one of the more enjoyable movies of the year.
First published in Businessworld 8.21.26
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