Maybe you saw the trailer for The End of Oak Street and thought, “What’s with the dinosaurs?” I’m here to tell you that the movie wisely doesn’t delve too deeply into that question. I’m not best pleased with David Robert Mitchell’s creature feature, but if you or your kids are obsessed with the big reptiles, this movie is better than any of the Jurassic World films. I just wish it had been better.
This is the third of Mitchell’s four films to be set in the Detroit area, where he grew up. This one takes place in the summer of 1982, where Greg and Denise Platt (Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway) find their marriage on the rocks. He hasn’t told her that he lost his job some weeks before and that his side gig delivering pizzas is now the family’s only source of income. Meanwhile, she’s secretly writing an autobiographical novel about a housewife who’s miserable with suburban motherhood. All that takes a backseat one night when they find that their house and everything else within a 2-mile radius has been zapped 200 million years back in time, and they have to barricade themselves in their house with their teenagers Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) to avoid being eaten by dinosaurs.
There’s much to like about the formal elements in this story. The rhythms and textures of life in this suburb and the everyday concerns of the people living there are well captured in the early going. When the Platt family starts to realize that their neighborhood has suddenly changed, the details indicating that are doled out judiciously before Greg finally cuts through someone’s yard looking for the family dog only to come face to face with a feathered raptor that looks at him and sees lunch. Mitchell’s visual talent shows, too, in a one-take shot when an allosaurus traps the kids and the parents run in crossways directions to distract the big predator, as well as with an apparently fictional snake-like dinosaur that slithers silently into the Platt family home.
Eh, I can’t overlook how this story consistently cheaps out when it comes to the family issues here. It is a thin development indeed when Brian goes out looking for the dog and results in the kids being separated from the parents. The dog then reappears at such a right moment that it’s borderline unforgivable. A Quiet Place didn’t resolve its character issues as easily as this movie, and last summer’s Weapons was better at depicting a community trying to deal with inexplicable horror.
Compared to those, The End of Oak Street feels like the lesser efforts of Steven Spielberg or J.J. Abrams (who produces this movie) — it gives this story its happy ending too easily. Hathaway’s full-throated performance, and the fact that she spends much of this movie wielding a shotgun, can’t make up for that. Mitchell has won a deserved cult following with It Follows and the splendidly twisted Under the Silver Lake. It’s understandable that he’s now trying to win over the popcorn crowd, but in the process he’s made too many compromises. That’s a shame.
The End of Oak Street
Starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Rated PG-13.
