This is a film about an all American family moves to a new town.
A block away from their new house they run over a streaking yellow animal in the road.
Ouch…
A few minutes later, as they’re unpacking the Volvo station wagon, an elderly neighbor spinster shuffles up to the front porch asking if they’ve seen her yellow tabby cat. It goes downhill from there, fast and steady.
Time and again, you wonder why the father doesn’t suspect something is amiss, as first his wife then his 10 year old boy get sick and act bizarrely. And yet, he’s overwhelmed with a new teaching job at the local college. He keeps telling his family that we have all our bad luck out of the way now; everything will surely get better.
It doesn’t. Neighbors die so frequently the coroner’s van spends more time in their neighborhood than the big yellow school bus. That doesn’t include the odd cyclist and babysitter who are mauled and tossed in the bushes to rot.
Then there’s this strange group of people who huddle in a smoke filled SUV a block away, conspiring.
The poor father does his level best to care for his family and to keep his wits about him. Things just keep getting worse and worse, though.
He’s an honest, upright hardworking fellow who strives to think the best of people and to look on the bright side of things. Life is about to blindside him, and how.
It’s kind of a dysfunctional plot but oddly compelling. Consciously I was ashamed to be spending my time watching this flick. Unconsciously I couldn’t stop myself.
The whole life-falling-apart-at-the-seams motif was inescapable. The clueless father who adores his family and dotes on his son, while failing to put two and two together as his world falls apart.
Hey, he’s in a new town with new neighbors in a new house – he’s too busy adjusting and fixing and exterminating the rats and hornets to see the big picture.
A whole generation of Baby Boomers was blindsided in just this same way. While we were working our buns off paying down the mortgage and raising 2.3 kids at $250,000 a head; negotiating all the new technology that evolved over the last 25 years — sure, in the back of our brains we registered at some level the first Iraq War, disco music, DVD players, the Internet and email — Bill Clinton getting his cock sucked in the White House, Waco burning, the second Iraq War — even 9/11 wasn’t that much of a shock; not with 2 kids in college and the dot.com meltdown and Al Gore’s cardboard persona punching holes in ballots in south Florida.
Then we hit the wall.
Home values cratered 50%. The financial meltdown on Wall Street precipitated a 50% drop in stocks. Our retirement nest egg vaporized overnight.
The kids graduated from college and couldn’t get a job. They moved back home. Suddenly we realized that stocks would now have to increase in value by 100% just to break even! No way, Jose!
Through it all, we kept a level head, halfway confident that everything would be okay. All the same, we started paying more attention to the news.
The earthquake on Wall Street had constant aftershocks in the following months. We opened our eyes to suddenly realize the nation that we’d spent our whole lives working to build wasn’t that nation anymore.
It’s been taken over by blacks and minorities and their extreme liberal agenda!
The most liberal politician in the history of the republic is president!
Horror of horrors, he’s actually been reelected – this just can’t be happening…
