The monsters are due on Maple Street, a wise gent once posited. No offense to our man Rod Serling, but he may have been off by a few blocks.
The legendary TV-show creator and hall-of-fame doomsayer would have undoubtedly dug The End of Oak Street, writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s contribution to the creatures-run-amok genre — it operates on a distinctly Twilight Zone-type of logic. Serling isn’t the primary influence hovering over this metaphor-friendly tale of the painfully ordinary disrupted by “Holy shit!” levels of extraordinary, however. It exists within a more modern shadow than Cold War paranoia and Eisenhower-era conformity, paying tribute to a different type of pop-culture giant. Mitchell isn’t trying to nudge viewers into another dimension, not only of sight and sound but of mind. He’s aiming for resurrecting the glory days of 1980s summer blockbusters, a close encounter of the vintage Amblin Entertainment kind. It’s easily the best homage-slash-rip-off of a Spielberg movie in ages.
Welcome to Oak Street, located squarely in Everysuburb USA, circa 1982. The annual summer block party, complete with sack races and grilled hot dogs, is in full swing. Among the participants are the Pratts, a picture-perfect American family provided you don’t notice the fraying edges on the periphery. Greg (Ewan McGregor) has to excuse himself from the festivities early to deliver a pizza; he’s been taking on side hustles to help make ends meet, especially because his brainy, snarky daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) has her eye on going to Cornell. Not even regular nips from a hidden bottle of whiskey in the garage can ease Greg’s self-loathing. His son, Brian (Christian Convery), is officially entering his early-teen rebellion phase. He has one eye on the new girl in town named Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis) and his other on constant lookout for the town bruiser, who’s issued an all-points beatdown bulletin on Brian after some shenanigans involving the guy’s brother.
And then there is Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway, adding to what’s already been a banner year). She’s losing her patience with her passive-to-a-fault husband who, in her words, has a tendency to pretend problems simply don’t exist. Denise has written a novel in secret, about a frustrated housewife itching to leave her husband and kids for a rich, fulfilling life in New York. It’s fiction, she insists, fooling nobody but herself. This would-be bestselling author has shared her manuscript with a retired book editor down the block. She thinks Denise has a shot at getting it published. Meanwhile, the high-strung guy next door is haranguing her about their dog, and threatens to kill the pooch if it keeps pooping on his lawn. She can’t even summon the energy to be polite anymore. You’d say she was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, minus the “verge” part.
The Pratts are in serious crisis, besieged by bullies and bad neighbors outside of their house and foundation-crumbling dysfunction inside it. So when odd occurrences like, say, the mysterious appearance of a plant that’s technically been extinct for 200 million years, or a massive, one-ton pile of dung showing up in the neighbor’s backyard — something chalked up to either a karmic prank or the dog seriously needing to change up his diet — no one really has the bandwidth to pay much attention. Then there’s a seismic rumble and a flash of blinding light in the middle of the night. Soon, the Pratts and their fellow Oak Street residents find themselves dealing with a plague of dinosaurs turning cul-de-sacs into killing grounds. Who has time to deal with the elephant in the room when you have to reckon with a T. rex snapping its blood-stained jaws at your front door?
Everything’s going great in The End of Oak Street.
Warner Bros.
This is the Jurassic lark that the movie uses to test its suburbanites, one in which the why of it all (there are a few cursory mentions of wormholes and Carl Sagan is name-dropped) is way less important than the way this family bonds over a major, inexplicable catastrophe. Your entire neighborhood has been unceremoniously transported back to a nightmare Flintstones scenario — time to circle around your loved ones and hone those long-dormant survivalist skills, folks! It turns out that maybe Dad can be good in a pinch, and Mom’s knack for compartmentalization sure comes in handy when trapped in a house filled with prehistoric alligators.
It should surprise no one that, like her character, Hathaway is the linchpin of The End of Oak Street, pirouetting from exasperation to affection to hysteria to steeliness in a way that would inspire a fist-bump from The Odyssey’s Penelope. Few contemporary A-list actors give better scared face than her, and as with her psychologically fraught pop star in Mother Mary, there’s a physicality to her action-mom turn here that’s thrilling to watch. Hathaway is in a serious groove right now, and we’re lucky to have her gracing so many screens over the past six months — though not as lucky as Mitchell is to have her anchoring his own personal experiment in time traveling.
Because the filmmaker is less interested in the prehistoric age of rampaging predators than the golden age of multiplex moviegoing, when blockbusters felt compelled to lace their spectacles with humanity and understood the delayed-gratification thrill of tension and release. Everything from the conspicuously faded visual palette — all the better to conjure up that spirit-of-’82 feeling, my dear — to the Jaws-to-Jurassic Park method of withholding the monsters as long as possible reeks of a bygone era of Spielbergmania. Though to be fair, even His Steveness wouldn’t be so cheeky as to have his heroes stumble across two huge dinos fucking against a house.
There’s a heavy dose of hero worship on display here, not just from Mitchell but producer J.J. Abrams as well; you can practically hear their we’re-not-worthy genuflecting mixed into the ambient background noise. But there’s also an attempt to channel the sensation they had as kids of being wowed by big studio tentpoles with a human touch. And a very human sense of complexity: Everyone remembers the eye-popping mother ship connection at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Fewer people recall the disturbing “crybaby” sequence. The people behind this flashback do, however, and their tribute is filled with those kind of raw, emotional, rough-edged moments in between full-on dino carnage.
If you’ve been following David Robert Mitchell’s career, it’s easy to see bits of his odds-and-sods previous work poking out of this grab for the OG-blockbuster brass ring. There’s the palpable sense of lived-in suburban life from his 2010 coming-of-age debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover. There’s the forward momentum and understanding of composing the frame for maximum effect that he displayed in his 2014 breakthrough It Follows. (Though by the time the 99th split-diopter shot shows up during a family conversation, you realize he maybe loves this filmmaking trick not wisely but too well?) And there’s the feeling that true weirdness is always just one lysergic layer below reality that characterized his 2018 cult classic Under the Silver Lake. The fact that he’s combined all of those elements and still hits the right notes for this karaoke take on yesteryear’s summertime entertainment makes this feel like more than cheap nostalgia. It’s not a question of whether or not they make ’em like this anymore. You’re just stoked they were able to make something like this at all right now.
