“The End of Oak Street” is a product of never letting go of the sense of wistful imagination and possibility. I’m talking about those days with your friends when you pictured yourselves as characters from a television show or from another time and place. Adulthood’s particular set of stressors doesn’t lend itself to walking around your neighborhood and asking yourself, “Hey, what if dinosaurs were here?” You’re going to the grocery store, and out comes a Brontosaurus, or the terrifying thought of a T-Rex running after you.
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell knows there’s a duality of insanity and thrill in that premise alone. It could easily go down the silly and B-movie route if you don’t ground it in something. Luckily for us, there is care in making all of “Oak Street’s” elements work to make an exciting, something scary, and heartfelt whole. The film doesn’t overexplain the “how we got here” phenomenon; rather, it grounds the explanation in one character’s personality and lets it flow naturally from there. Fantasy and danger exist on an equal playing field. Tangibility: humans would be a bipedal buffet for a healthy number of prehistoric creatures, and “Oak Street” doesn’t let you forget that.
“The End of Oak Street” : Photo Credit: Warner Bros.
The 1980s’s suburbia setting is reminiscent of the Stephen Spielberg/Amblin era films down to the themes of parental strife and togetherness. Mitchell pushes the PG-13 rating in the same manner “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” did. There is blood at points, and people get eaten. But this doesn’t work if you don’t have the investment in a core set of characters. The Platt family is your quintessential wife, husband, and two-teenage-kids unit, and they convey this warm, welcoming feeling when you see them at a summer block party.
However, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are at the last productive vestiges of their marriage. Greg lost his job and has to take a bunch of side gigs, including one as a pizza delivery man. Denise is an aspiring writer, and when she’s not trying to keep the family together, she secretly goes to the basement to work on a novel. She gets compliments from a neighbor serving as an editor on how realistic and lived-in it feels. Unfortunately, the main character of that story has an intense desire to suddenly leave and go to New York.
Their kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), can sense something is wrong as the fights have only been growing. However, Mitchell gives the teenagers their own separate personalities outside of that. Audrey is heavily into astrophysics and Carl Sagan. She aspires to follow Sagan’s path and go to Cornell for college. Brian is shown getting into teenage boy hijinks with his three friends around the neighborhood. As a running bit, an older brother is looking for his little brother, Brian, due to an accidental injury he may have caused. There’s also a new girl in town named Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis) who catches his eye, but she goes to a private school, which he is curious about. Can’t forget about Mel (P. J. Byrne), the next-door neighbor who often complains about the adorable Platt family dog Starbuck getting into his yard.
“The End of Oak Street” : Photo Credit: Warner Bros.
Things start to get a little weird around the cul-de-sacs and green lawns of Oak Street. At night, big bursts of light ricochet and boom across the sky. It starts with an odd, prehistoric-looking plant, then a huge stack of poop on Mel’s long. Then the big boom happens, and the residents of Oak Street find themselves transported back to the Mesozoic Era. Any street outlets are suddenly covered by huge forests, and yeah, there are dinosaurs and other ancient dangers roaming around looking for a meal. Coupled with the loss of power and dwindling resources such as food and water, the Platt family are in deep trouble.
“The End of Oak Street” is a fantastical summer thrill ride in which a new obstacle appears every time a family member steps outside. If the huge alligators don’t get you, pterodactyls will. The horrors, either by land or air, never stop and bring a freshness other than that of a suburban Jurassic Park. Even with the thrill and scariness of it all, Mitchell manages to root the film back in the characters.
There’s a point in the middle of the film when all the members of the Platt family are sitting in their living room, trying to make sense of what’s happening. As one person speaks, there’s a split-diopter shot of someone else’s reaction in the background. The kids are obviously terrified, but Denise and Greg are at odds about what exactly to tell them. Denise is a rationalist — they are running low on food, and people in the neighborhood are getting torn apart by beasts. She is not exactly the most optimistic person (and who could blame her?) Greg is almost irrationally calm about the circumstances. He even mentions religion as something he anchors his “everything is going to be okay” line of thinking. There’s a clash that proves to be almost the straw that broke the camel’s back for this union and also a cracking of the door in terms of a way forward that the quartet of Hathaway, McGregor, Stella, and Convery pull off. Hathaway, in particular, is the main ingredient that proves the film the emotional, relatable gravitas it needs.
Mitchell reminds us of a time when the wildest stories could come to fruition on the big screen without being overly indulgent in telling the audience, “This is where we’d rather be.” “The End of Oak Street” allows the kid in us to run wild with our possibilities and hide our faces under the covers all the same. The commercials, the on-point and lively set and costume designs from Maya Shimoguchi and Erin Benach, invoke an era that’s been revisited a lot in recent years. But the magic of that time, with films like “The Goonies” or “E.T.”, is there if we want.
