Dino of Suburbia
So, it would seem it really does never hurt to toss some dinosaurs into your movie.
The End of Oak Street
Director: David Robert Mitchell • Writer: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Christian Convery, Maisy Stella
USA • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong August 13 • IIA
Grade: B
David Robert Mitchell is one of those filmmakers whose movies are curiosities of the highest order: You love them and the big, creative swings they take – hit or whiff – or you really don’t. But after the STI metaphor horror It Follows in 2014, and the aggressively LA noir thriller Under the Silver Lake (2018) Mitchell has proven to be a director that will go there. Now comes The End of Oak Street, a delightfully odd period piece family drama sci-fi creature feature comedy (yeah, you read that right), and whether that means the terminus of the physical road or a proverbial suburban armageddon is up to the viewer. Either way, distributor Warner Bros. appears to be so consumed with getting paid by the Paramount nepoligarch it’s not paying attention to the potential sleeper hit they have on their hands here. And it’s a shame. Oak Street picks up the baton in this summer’s Original Story Ideas Only Please relay race, does its job handily and doesn’t deserve to be buried at the end of August. Nor does it deserve to be “marketed” with a bullshit AI slop dog podcast. Save yourself and don’t go look for that.
Oak Street begins like all Kids on Bikes media (started by the grandaddy, ET, Stand by Me, Super 8, Stranger Things) does. It’s a sunny weekend on a leafy, racial-tension free suburban street. The neighbours are barbequeing and playing wholesome games and everyone is happy. It’s Michigan in the ’80s (because if it’s now everyone has an iPhone so the isolation doesn’t work), so the car industry is wobbling, and Denise and Greg Platt’s (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) marriage has seen better days. Their son Brian (Christian Convery) is getting into trouble and their daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is figuring out she’s not straight. There’s an invincible dog, Starbuck, and a classic asshole neighbour, Mel (a master at playing this kind of character, PJ Byrne), who hates the dog. Then one night there’s lightning, a pressure drop, and boom. The entire ’hood is transported through time to the… Jurassic? Cretaceous? whatever period. Cue dinosaurs.
Cretaceous garden
The snarky charm of Oak Street lies in how Mitchell starts to deconstruct every single one of those 1980s Kids on Bikes movies it’s loosely modelled on. The Platts are under all sorts of marital stress and there’s no shooing it away and keeping it hidden from the kids. Greg clearly feels, or fears, he’s failing at the whole traditional bread-winner dad game – which he is depending on how you feel about swallowing your pride and getting shit done. Denise has ambitions she’s convinced herself she has no right to aim for. Welcome to the Reagan years, gurl! Miserable parents are par for the course in the sub-genre but they’re never quite this overtly miserable.
But Mitchell has a mean streak that’s tempered with some dark comedy and that puts Oak Street into a category unto itself. Like any, let’s face it, Amblin®-style adventure the family drama’s there, but we’re here to see the body, the aliens, the demogorgon – and the dinosaurs. Mitchell’s not trying to duplicate Jurassic Park, but he is trying to paint a portrait of an idyll gone psychotic, and doing a good job of it. There’s always something going on in the distance, often hilarious, and once the first feathery predator shows up it’s game on. On top of that, the characters often do the right thing, the smart thing, even if it doesn’t work out, and there’s something amusingly vicious about those failures. Of course the Platts do dumb stuff (jump together, you fools), but it’s a creature feature and there has to be some stupidity and hand-waving – don’t think too hard on the timey-wimey portal shenanigans of it all – to keep the action moving forward. Strangely, tucked in there are some deadly serious emotional moments that are actually earned.
The downside is that Mitchell either chickened out (unlikely) or fell under the sway of Bad Robot honcho, gulp, JJ Abrams, a producer-director who never met a studio/market compromise he couldn’t make nice with; he rightly deserves to have his feet held to the fire for The Rise of Skywalker and Star Trek Into Darkness. WTF, JJ? Abrams’ fingerprints are all over Oak Street in the nostalgic parts as well as the resolutions and half-assed follow-through – his trademark. Time and again Mitchell comes right up to the line and then backs off just before things get too dark, too final or too adult. Mitchell is confident enough to fuck with the formula; he keeps setting up what we’ve seen before, only to change the game, and it’s wonderfully kooky in a Twilight Zone kind of way that brings new meaning to “one big pile of shit” and life finding a way. But there’s regular tonal swing from sincere back to silly that doesn’t always work, and that vague Abrams-y hesitancy to go all the way down the rabbit hole into IIB/III territory. The End of Oak Street is less a dropped ball than a near miss, and despite its flaws it’s a good time, unlike any other dinosaur movie in recent memory and WAY better than the last The Worst Chris, Pratt-led Jurassic World entry. Get ready for the memes.