The End of Oak Street Review

The American Dream Goes the Way of the Dinosaurs

By: Marc Kozak

The End of Oak Street

The American Dream Goes the Way of the Dinosaurs

By: Marc Kozak

For the first 15 minutes of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re watching a movie made in an entirely different era. Happy families flood the streets for a block party in a picturesque suburban neighborhood. Kids and dogs scurry in every direction while the adults revel in middle-class prosperity amidst the smell of meat cooking on the grill. The Platt family are all smiles in the middle of the action, as Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) take part in a bag hop race with their two adoring children. How lucky are they to be alive in 1980s America, where the American Dream is still alive and well, and everyone sleeps easy at night, carefree and safe in an idyllic haven of perfect lawns and the latest cars.

Mitchell spends the rest of the movie reminding us that those halcyon days are dead and buried, a dream left over from a time that’s been gone for so long that it may as well have been the Mesozoic Era. 2026 is a much more chaotic and dangerous time to be alive; even the simple act of going outside can sometimes seem like a Spielbergian adventure story. Everything around us seems like it’s falling apart, and things that we used to find comfort in – our neighbors, our community, our homes, our material possessions – are more often than not sources of increasing anxiety.

So you can (mostly) understand how the Platt family feels after they find themselves and their entire neighborhood mysteriously transported into the middle of a prehistoric land full of hungry dinosaurs. There’s no reason given (nor does there need to be) and by extension, not a lot that anyone can do about it. Suddenly nothing and nowhere feels safe, and any soothing promise that everything will turn out okay seems naively optimistic at best, an outright lie at worst. Any personal dreams or ambitions the individual family members used to have are rendered completely irrelevant. It’s hard for them to hold out any hope for a better future because it sure doesn’t seem like they’ll be around long enough to have a future. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?

Such are the clever thematic underpinnings of what is also just a gnarly as hell action movie, as Mitchell delights in showing us lots of people getting savagely hunted and eaten by all kinds of uncaring dinosaurs. Lead characters, side characters, old people, young people, even pets – no one is safe from being gruesomely injured and/or devoured. It’s often so mean-spirited that you can’t help but laugh; Mitchell almost seems to go out of his way to make sure we see each and every one of the characters we met earlier in the movie get taken out, their deaths often taking place with a comic casualness on the edges of the frame. This isn’t a fun dino romp for the whole family; it’s pure animalistic carnage, often heightened to such a ridiculous degree that you can’t believe what you’re seeing. It’s no wonder it feels exponentially more unpredictable (and thrilling) than any of the recent Jurassic movies.

" It’s no wonder it feels exponentially more unpredictable (and thrilling) than any of the recent Jurassic movies. "

Plus, there’s the simple pleasure of watching Anne Hathaway mow down dinosaurs with a shotgun while Ewan McGregor KOs another one with a sledgehammer. The two veteran actors are not only having a great time going into action hero mode, but they’re also able to make you care about their emotional desires being crushed or saved amidst all of the bloodshed. Denise (Hathaway) is writing a novel in secret, using it as a place to pour out all of her frustrations and doubts about her seemingly perfect family life. She often feels like maybe she just doesn’t love her husband and even her children, reacting to the stifling, all-encompassing responsibilities of being a dutiful housewife in the 1980s. Greg (McGregor) has secrets of his own; he’s frustrating and embarrassing his wife by moonlighting as a pizza delivery driver, while concealing the truth that he lost his primary job some time ago. Both are struggling to maintain the façade and hold onto the stereotypical gender roles (the mother, the provider) that they think give them value in this world, all while pushing each other away and alienating their kids.

The kids have their own problems, purposely typical of the kinds of stuff you’d expect and have seen in other 80s movies and television shows. Brian (Christian Convery) rides around the neighborhood on bikes with his scruffy-headed friends, sneaking cigarettes and ogling the mysterious new girl in town. He does his best to come off as tough and macho, but in reality, he’s an emotional and fragile guy who needs a lot of support from his family. Audrey (Maisy Stella) is on the cusp of finishing high school, even as she struggles to fit in with the other girls in the neighborhood. She’d rather nerd out about Carl Sagan than chase after cute boys, which is decidedly uncool to her peers.

Mitchell wonderfully subverts our expectations with the small interior arcs of these characters, forcing each one of them to sink or swim with the harsh realities of their new situation. They don’t always get what they want (for a particularly amusing reason in Brian’s case) because that’s the way the world works. Back then, it may have seemed like you had every opportunity to succeed if you just worked hard enough – but as we all know now (and are often tired of being reminded), life is unfair. Sometimes you don’t get the girl, and sometimes a dinosaur eats your friends. C'est la vie.

A lot of ground is covered in just 99 minutes, immaculately paced by Mitchell and editor John Axelrad. Even though the Platts are constantly under threat both inside and outside of their own home, Mitchell still finds little pockets of space for meaningful little character moments. When things get to be too much, Audrey hides in the car in the garage to tearfully sing along to almost the entirety of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie”. Denise and Greg encounter two dinosaurs having a moment and take a Polaroid of the occasion, sharing the same sense of dark goofiness that made them attracted to each other in the first place. There are well considered moments like this throughout the movie, making it an enjoyable experience for more reasons than simply watching dinosaurs wreck the place.

That being said, it’s a lot of fun to simply watch dinosaurs wreck the place. The creature effects, blending practical stunt and set work with digital animation from Industrial Light & Magic, are often very good (the “dinosaurs should have feathers crowd” will be particularly delighted). It’s also impressive that Mitchell manages to make dinosaurs both terrifying and hilarious, often at the same time. There is a giant, snake-like creature that looks so ridiculously stupid (and the movie knows it, playing it for laughs), all before it eventually opens its mouth and becomes an absolute nightmare. There are a few moments when the tone threatens to teeter too far in the serious direction, but Mitchell always manages to tip it back the other way with a well-placed gag or a situation that is so absurd that it momentarily breaks the tension.

Really, the biggest question the movie will leave you with is: why has David Robert Mitchell been in director’s jail for so long? After breaking onto the scene with the modern horror classic, It Follows, his 2018 follow-up Under the Silver Lake was (incorrectly) met with a collective shrug, and the 51-year-old filmmaker hasn’t been able to get a project off the ground since. Hopefully this spells the end of that streak of bad luck (a sequel to It Follows is also currently in development), as we could certainly use a lot more mid-budget, original stories like this one on a routine basis.

Americans are all too familiar with the idea that our best days as a country are behind us – even most of our entertainment is drenched in a nostalgic coat of paint that desperately tries to transport us back to better days. Leave that sort of thinking to the dinosaurs among us; The End of Oak Street hopefully serves as a death knell for our sentimental infatuation with decades long gone, providing an urgent warning that we better start coming to terms with our new reality, even if it does seem unrecognizable and scary. The only other option is extinction.