This summer may have seen Steven Spielberg definitively surrender his world’s-biggest-director crown to Christopher Nolan, as Disclosure Day became (culturally speaking) an early-season curio, compared to The Odyssey’s bona fide phenomenon. (In terms of expressing their respective filmmakers’ despairs and joys on a big canvas, they’re both terrific.) But Spielberg’s influence will continue, sometimes emerging from less expected places. For example: The last time we saw writer-director David Robert Mitchell, he was staring in void where the soul of the toxic millennial male was supposed to be – not exactly the stuff of the aspiring Amblin acolyte, or even a good soldier for J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot.
Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake, a movie too clever for even A24 to give it a proper release, is a sprawling Los Angeles amateur-detective noir that’s like Inherent Vice, The Big Lebowski, or The Long Goodbye, only its considerably more loathsome protagonist operates through a haze of solipsistic nostalgia and Reddit-y conspiracies, rather than comparably harmless pot smoke. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this project led to Mitchell spending some time in director jail, which is sort of like regular jail if the warden was a C-suite dork and the other inmates were all on Letterboxd. More surprisingly, Mitchell has busted out with The End of Oak Street, a Bad Robot-produced big-budget fantasy movie about a family of four mysteriously transported to dinosaur times. It seemed surprisingly high-profile for someone who went out of his way to make sure everyone knows his last protagonist smelled really bad. When Oak Street, originally Flowervale Street, was renamed, then delayed from a series of release dates before finally landing in August, I thought: Ah, that’s more like it.
The End of Oak Street is packed with period detail – striped polos, tube socks, boxy TVs, Pat Benatar on the soundtrack – punctuated by a twist that will only seem like one to Mitchell’s cult: This time, he actually admits what year it is, albeit seemingly under duress. The specific drop of 1982 doesn’t happen until late in the game, well after Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor), along with their 13-year-old son Brian (Christian Convery) and 16-ish daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) have been transported back to what looks like prehistoric times as passengers on a chunk of suburban landscape, deposited in the middle of a jungle. In Mitchell’s Linklater-y coming-of-age dramedy The Myth of the American Sleepover and pre-A24 horror film It Follows, the suburbs seemed to bend time and space. It Follows famously (again, to the Mitchell fans) juxtaposed some old-style TVs with a futuristic-looking shell-shaped e-reader, among other old-meets-new touchstones, locating the story in a kind of perpetual, liminal space between summer and fall, which was also the focal point of Sleepover (set on the last day of summer vacation, a spiritual though not technical season-change). Oak Street deals with more literal displacement; maybe the lack of precision there is how Mitchell is getting his unspecified-year kicks. Though the family is going back in time, to the audience they’re, in a sense, moving forward from retro pleasures to de-facto futuristic, brandishing weapons and driving vehicles the various roaming dinosaurs will never have seen before.
It’s fitting, then, that the movie’s original setting combines the release year of E.T. with the most relentless batch of dinos since Spielberg was making the Jurassic Park movies himself. This is an unavoidably Spielbergian enterprise; Denise and Greg are having angry-whisper marital problems before sharper teeth enter the picture, while Brian’s shot at kids-on-bikes adventure abruptly disappears with the displacement. Other neighborhood families are similarly stranded, but the togetherness that Disclosure Day pleads for, however briefly, can find little purchase here, more halfhearted side thought than thematic concern. Though Denise and Greg aren’t (yet) divorced, there’s more than a little War of the Worlds in the sheer terror inflicted upon a family unprepared for such horrors.
That was a subject of It Follows, too, as its cusp-of-adulthood sorta-teens had to contend with a murkily sourced murderous curse and, as such, the looming specter of death. The scene in that film where our intrepid investigators sit in a yard as a slightly more experienced boy explains what he knows about the received lore of the following ghost is echoed here where the four family members sit on the floor of their displaced ex-suburban home, cross-legged in a neatly composed square, and attempt to talk through the risks they’re facing. Mitchell composes much of the scene with split-diopter shots, the visual gimmick that allows an extreme close-up to share the frame with an equally-focused image much further away, with a blurred line separating the two. (It’s something Hannah Einbinder’s character nerdily flags in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.) Here, everyone framed this way, typically a parent and child, is together, but distorted into distance, as Denise grows particularly frustrated with Greg falling back to reassuring-dad-isms, which she sees as a symptom of his serial dishonesty.
Elsewhere, Mitchell and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (who has also shot, appropriately, for M. Night Shyamalan and Jordan Peele) use more split diopters and careful framing to make images from suburban windows look like little movie screens or memory plays, running images of joy (and later menace) juxtaposed with the worried faces of the suburb’s inhabitants situated outside the frame-within-the-frame. If that’s too subtle, the movie also has a running family-photo motif, with characters constantly reminded of their past promise – and in one touchingly silly time-out, their absurd present. How much of the early-summer reverie that opens the picture is already a fading memory before the family’s abrupt transition out of time? After all, Brian and Audrey are harly kids anymore; by making both of them teenagers, Mitchell tips the scales toward disillusionment and worry, rather than the wonder usually allowed to cross those Spielberg faces. Yet like younger Brian, the filmmaker seems to want to believe in Greg’s ability to strengthen the contours of his dadness. The movie is dedicated to Mitchell’s own father.
If there’s additional, built-in unsettlement at the sight of Mitchell, whose Silver Lake protagonist drew frantic connections between the texts of his childhood (Nintendo Power magazine, cereal boxes), making a play for a sincere Amblin throwback, well, at least he doesn’t sell short the absolute terror of the situation in the moment. There are closer dino-scrapes here than anything in the recent Jurassic World pictures, although there’s also a scrappily heroic dog the likes of which even Spielberg hasn’t been shameless enough to train on his audience; recall, always and forever, that he fed a dog-reaction-shot subject to a T. rex in The Lost World. But while the emphases of various comic and harrowing notes are a little different in Mitchell’s version of the haunted suburbs, there’s a similarly productive tension between adventure and horror, the latter frequently juiced by creatures that creep (or, in one especially chilling scenario, slither) toward our heroes when their backs are turned. At times, the movie plays like the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park at feature length.
There’s additional tension between the directness of the fantastical threat and what remains unsaid. Some of the film’s best moments are dialogue-free and uncommented-upon: Audrey sneaking into the family car, still parked in their intact-for-now driveway, to listen to a cassette tape in despairing, dangerous privacy (and a murmured singalong); Denise’s quiet anguish about the loss of a secret project when the house’s basement floods; a realization that Brian has about his budding crush object, both hilarious and poignant. Mitchell’s skill in depicting these moments, alongside the movie’s ultra-efficient 99-minute runtime on the heels of a 140-minute sprawler, makes me wonder if there was once a longer, more contemplative cut of this movie where a bunch of people get torn apart by dinosaurs. The movie’s eventual solution has certain elements that could have been last-minute additions.
Even taking the whole movie as Mitchell’s vision doesn’t clear up where, exactly, all this tension is supposed to lead us. The End of Oak Street finishes a summer movie season tentpoled up by Spielberg and Nolan’s respective versions of world-beating spectacle – Spielberg’s sheer intuition with the camera; Nolan’s in-camera sets-and-costumes majesty captured on large-format celluloid – chased with different forms of distress over the state of the world. (Spielberg’s version was tagged as unbidden hopecore, but it’s really more of a hopeful ellipsis.) In a weird way, Oak Street is a more optimistic variant, somehow from the director of It Follows and the movie where Spider-Man turns out to be the hipster creep next door. Given those movies’ open endings, Mitchell’s finale here, while put across with his usual playful yet efficient elegance and fitting for a certain version of this story, isn’t entirely convincing. The filmmaker, nowhere near as young as the likes of Curry Barker or Kane Parsons but still earlier in his career than an elder statesman, seems eager to bring his characters back to those family photos, to remind them how to live better, rather than convinced that those halcyon days have passed. Maybe he’s found some refuge himself from all of that uncertainty; maybe, like so many of us, a certain kind of movie has a comfort-zone aura radiating beyond simple reason.
