You might not be able to tell what movie David Robert Mitchell set out to make with “The End of Oak Street,” but he made it pretty well. The dinos-in-suburbia premise sets the stage for big and potentially meaningful summer fun, but the movie flies off the rails in incredibly strange, oddly amusing, but ultimately self-defeating ways. Will you remember it next week? Probably not, but it’s hard to deny its momentary delights.
A neighborhood summer barbecue introduces us to Oak Street, an unassuming American township ripped right from an Amblin feature. It’s the early 1980s and everyone is a stock cinematic type, especially the central family. There’s the secretive, worn-down father, Greg (Ewan McGregor), who lies about losing his cushy job and sips whiskey in secret. He’s married to the enterprising but frustrated Denise (Anne Hathaway), whose secret talents as a novelist take a backseat to raising a family.
Their tween son Brian (Christian Coventry) bicycles around with a handful of adventurous, playful pals — he has a loyal dog, Starbuck, and he sports a bow and arrow. Meanwhile, his nearly college-aged sister Audrey (Maisy Stella) has her nose in physics books, but keeps her eyes trained on the stars.
There are bullies and crushes too, who weave in and out of the story alongside an annoying neighbor, but no one who really sticks around apart from the prototypical quartet. Strange happenings around the neighborhood, like flashes of light, and uncanny flora where they shouldn’t be, engender curiosity, but no one is the wiser until one fine day, all of Oak Street finds itself mysteriously transported some 200 million years in the past. That’s both the basic premise and the entire extent of the conceit, but the movie ends up having fun with it, if only intermittently.
From the get-go, Mitchell whips out fairly adequate impressions of Steven Spielberg, between wide-eyed kid characters, their brink-of-divorce parents, the general suburban sprawl, and composer Michael Giacchino doing his best John Williams. You could reasonably reduce the plot to “Jurassic Park” invades “E.T.” (or “Close Encounters”) but what Mitchell has going for him as the umpteenth Spielberg fanboy director — including the film’s own producer, J.J. Abrams — is his economy of storytelling.
Even before there’s a hint of sci-fi to be found, Mitchell smartly gives us a tour of the neighborhood (which is to say, the site of future action) while introducing his characters in lengthy takes and split diopter shots that combine environment and story. He positions Greg, Denise, Brian and Audry not just geographically, but emotionally, along carefully laid out physical axes that switch focus and point-of-view, making for a rhythmic initial act.
When it comes time to pull the trigger, he does so with gusto, thrusting the family and their surroundings headfirst into the sudden confusion of finding themselves in the Jurassic period, as their neighborhood becomes engulfed by a litany of large, feathery dinosaurs (a win for all you dino purists), and the family is forced to stick together while searching for their dog. Mitchell, who also directed the slow-burn horror “It Follows,” knows how to use visual composition to slowly twist the movie’s screws.
He has a ball of a time setting the stage, with stegosaurus spikes peeking over neighborhood fences, and sudden surprises from just out of frame to jolt you here and there. The latter does, however, end up being necessary, since the film has a number of lethargic moments in between its set pieces, which is a damn shame for something that runs a tight 100 minutes.
What seems, at first, like a straightforward adventure drama takes some maniacal tonal turns, for better and worse. Once the family figures out the plot mechanics around them — which end up being fairly random, and tie moments of spectacle only loosely together — “The End of Oak Street” careens off its Spielbergian course and crash-lands in surprisingly farcical territory, as though the Fabelmans had wandered onto the set of “Cloverfield.”
It becomes pure, turn-your-brain-off entertainment, with Hathaway blasting raptors with a shotgun, McGregor swinging a sledgehammer at a T-Rex like it’s a cartoon mallet, and strange, snakelike creatures ratcheting up the tension by slithering through every corner of the family’s home completely undetected.
It also, unfortunately, becomes a turn-your-heart-off movie too, thanks to some bizarre story zigzags that render the preceding family drama almost entirely moot. Is it unexpected? Sure! Does it lead to anything worthwhile? Er… That’s a little more complicated. For one thing, “The End of Oak Street” is really only a neighborhood film in name; to say that its other characters are window dressing would be giving them too much credit.
Maybe that’s the effect of COVID on the American melodrama — the nuclear family is paramount, even more so than before — but the film is, by and large, about four characters traversing a sprawling backlot, with new dino dangers at every turn. Their interactions with other people in the first act lead largely to open-ended questions, save perhaps for new neighbor Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), a girl Brian crushes on only to be hilariously disappointed.
Lofty themes are frequently broached in dialogue, between the characters’ varying religious beliefs and Audrey’s genuine interest in the mysteries of the cosmos, but absolutely none of these play into the story, despite having been seemingly set up for this purpose. “The End of Oak Street” is an incredibly disjointed movie that even cheats on its basic drama by the end, by using its premise to build surprisingly easy off-ramps. However, for the brief moments Mitchell is allowed to craft chaotic spectacle, it makes for a visceral thrill-ride worthy of laughter and applause.
Image credit: “The End of Oak Street”
This guest post is written by the best in the business, world class film critic Siddhant Adlakha.
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