Tonight, grumbling and dragging my feet, I plopped my ass into a coveted center seat for an 8pm showing of The End of Oak Street, bemoaning that there was yet another useless dinosaur movie out there. Anticlimactically, I walked out just as annoyed, feeling like this film was a new kind of useless.
Qs and As
As I waited for The End of Oak Street to begin, I bravely turned to the couple sitting near me and asked them why they had decided to come see the movie. They gave me a good answer: “David Robert Mitchell”. This guy made that fucking banger of an enigma, Under the Silver Lake, a movie that I am confident befuddled literally everyone who saw it. I’d argue that 70% of viewers were the wrong kind of befuddled, and 30% were so befuddled that they think it’s one of the best films of all time. He’s also the guy behind It Follows, which nearly everyone loved.
Right before the movie started, a stocky, blue collar-coded dude slammed his ass into the seat next to me, popped a handful of Zyns, and proceeded to have the most earnest, animated reactions to the movie. I mean the dude was pumping his fist and clapping. As he flinched at the many jumpscares, I pondered if this guy was on the spectrum- but in a hopeful way. My theory regarding his mental state was confirmed at the midpoint of the film, a scene that I will be dubbing, “The Moment”.
“The Moment” is a scene nearly right at the halfway point of The End of Oak Street, which, I think, will be the most divisive and talked about scene in the movie. I’d wager that half of everyone will watch it and go, “What the FUCK!? Hell yeah!” The other half will go, “What the FUCK!? Oh no!”
My new friend and I were the first kind, but at the most stupid end of the scale. As everyone else gasped in surprise and sadness at “The Moment”, he and I burst out in incredulous laughter. That moment was pure David Robert Mitchell. Just through and through a “what the fuck” scene that left me choking on my popcorn, and him clapping gleefully. “The Moment.”
I got the guy’s number, by the way. We’re movie friends now. He wants to add me to a Signal group, but I’m quite afraid he’s going to get me involved in trains or Magic the Gathering.
I am also friends with a darling woman who runs the ticket booth at the theater, and she always asks me if I liked the movie I just watched. She’s a sweetheart and I’m not enough of an asshole to tell her, “please stop asking me, I rarely know what I thought or felt about a movie 5 seconds after leaving it.” She also asked me to rate the movie out of ten, which…
Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!
So anywho, I gave her a self-discrediting “5/10” answer.
The Question to End all Questions
As I mentioned, I’m still fucking bewildered why this movie exists and why David Robert Mitchell is the guy who’s directing it. I mean, I had similar complaints about the other, random, independent dinosaur movie 65, so maybe I’m just a hater. Still. Watching this movie gave me literally no answers.
The End of Oak Street is relatively straightforward. Almost insultingly so? A wormhole sends a small neighborhood 200 million years into the past, and a nuclear family of 4 has to figure out how to survive, find another wormhole, and jump through it to return to their time. So they do all of that.
They have a few “omg a dinosaur wants to eat me!” moments, and according to my new ginger autist friend, the dinosaurs were accurate to our best approximations of what they really looked like back then. There are a few jumpscares. Anne Hathaway acted like an absolute fucking professional, considering she had just come off of filming Christopher fucking Nolan’s The Fucking Odyssey. Ewan McGregor, bless his heart, took to heart “be a classic, cliche, affable, lame, middle-aged loser white dad”. The kids were a goddamn nuisance. The filmmakers absolutely did not invest in the CGI, and the one person on set who phoned this shit in more than anyone else was the cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis.
The thematic and character dramas that were set up in the first half of the movie completely unravel after “The Moment”. In retrospect, I do think that there were a few narrative clues foreshadowing that a moment would happen, but there is no preparing for “The Moment”. After that point, the movie becomes an uninspired, straightforward, pedal to the medal on a straight road free of potholes drive, heading expeditiously towards the climax.
The climax was also pretty… lame… I think there were a few times, especially towards the end, where David Robert Mitchell wanted to, and could have, gone off the fucking rails. I think the studio only allowed him one chance: “The Moment”. So unfortunately the climax was the most drawn out, convoluted, and exhausting “and they lived happily ever after”.
Having seen the movie, and having written what I did, I then decided to see if the internet could provide some answers. Here’s what I found:
Googling my Symptoms
I made an earnest effort to see if I could figure out the ‘why’ behind this film. Why was it made, why Robert Mitchell picked this as his next project. Turns out, the answer is the same as I would have gotten if I asked any of my friends at the theater today: “Just because he wanted to!”
There’s a beautiful simplicity in something like that, and the fact that this movie was made. Mitchell, after all his success and cleverness, turned around, got giddy about an idea, and then just said fuck it, let’s do dinosaur worm hole dark comedy.
In my search, I clicked through many, many articles, random blogs, chat rooms, and a handful of director interviews. Along the way, I got a fun little Cloverfield reddit interlude, which should be a fun read. I found my cathartic answer in the below interview, and I stopped watching at about three minutes in.
Mitchell made the movie just because. No clever metaphor, no ridiculous horror, no maddening mysteries. The man did it for the love of the game. Isn’t that every single filmmaker’s dream? Isn’t it every 12-year old’s dream to just… make a dinosaur movie? I think that’s really beautiful.
I think I’m just too pretentious for my own good, as I’ve mentioned once or twice before. This movie is just a repeat what I went through for Black Adam. Clearly, I didn’t learn a fucking thing.
In Praise (and Criticism) of Mitchell’s Women
There is something to be said about the women in this film, and a case of missed potential. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of setup done in the first half of the movie, and every character is given a lot of really good setup and characterization. It actually gave me hope that this movie wasn’t going to be as straightforward as I anticipated.
- Ewan McGregor is a classic husband who can’t face his issues, runs from quality time with his family, and hides his issues to put on a macho exterior.
- The son is a little bitch boy who keeps doing dumb shit and should have died. He also develops a crush on the new girl, and hilariously, turns out she ends up with his sister.
- The daughter is given a glowing neon sign that flashed “this is the clever one, she’s gonna figure it out”. She is clever, and arguably her Cornell-desiring brain helped the family figure out what happened to them. Also she’s lesbian and steals her brother’s crush.
- Anne Hathaway’s character is given the most complex, feminist foundation. She’s a woman stuck in a relationship with an uncommunicative, lying, alcoholic husband. She lives a lame, suburban life where she has to smile and pretend that everything is ok. She’s writing a secret novel about a woman who wishes she could live a life that wasn’t so domestic. She harbors a hidden strength and fire that she keeps suppressed so she doesn’t hurt the men’s feelings. Hathaway is shown to struggle with the fact that she may not necessarily like the life she’s living, and all of this she’s going through in 1982.
All of the other women in this movie are shown to be smart, capable, and educated or yearning for education.
Unfortunately, again, it all goes away following “The Moment”. In fact, the climax and Hathaway’s final action felt strangely anti-feminist. It was antithetical to her early struggles and choices, and personally, the ending was such a fucking “riding off into the sunset” type of flowery rainbow of smiles that I was absolutely irked.
You could chalk this story up to a very clever subversion of a morals and themes. That this story is a tragedy painted with bright yellows and pinks. Given Under the Silver Lake and It Follows’ endings, I can buy that. I can buy that Mitchell wanted to have an ending that feels all nice and perfect on the surface, but is actually kind of a depressing, disturbing end. That would allow Hathaway’s character to, instead of growing, retract into the safety of the predictability of suburban life. After all, an unpredictable adventure was absolutely terrifying- and she didn’t even leave the fucking neighborhood!
I don’t buy it. A sudden veer into complex after the straightforward nature of the rest of the movie feels unlikely. Again, maybe I’m just pretentious.
I rated The End of Oak Street
YMMV
I saw The End of Oak Street in theaters, but I expect it’ll hit streaming sooner rather than later given it was absolutely lambasted by Spider-Man and The Odyssey.
85scenes Reviews 