Now that we’ve gotten the mess that was Disclosure Day out of the way, David Robert Mitchell is here to show us what a Spielberg movie should look like. The End of Oak Street, the latest film from David Robert Mitchell after his stint in director’s purgatory, is delightful. The type of summer blockbuster that we used to get and that this is trying to mimic is about spectacle, and man, does Mitchell nail it!
The End of Oak Street Review
A still from The End of Oak Street. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
A still from The End of Oak Street. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
A still from The End of Oak Street. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
The End of Oak Street follows the Platt family, an ordinary family in the ’80s, the one with marital issues and angsty teenagers who find their entire town transported into dinosaur time, B.C. For all its seeming bells and whistles, The End of Oak Street is a formally simple film. Mitchell is very keen on his re-creation of Spielberg in that, despite all the spectacle, there’s always a sense of simplicity for the audience to follow.
Mitchell tells us this story of a family on the brink that fits very neatly into a capital-D dinosaur flick. You see, Denise (Anne Hathaway) is reconsidering her marriage. Her children, Audrey (Maisy Stella), a thoughtful, normal girl type, and kid brother Brian (Christian Convery), an excitable little guy, can see as much in their arguments. Hathaway portrays Denise with this sense of stress that certainly isn’t helped by the monsters lining up to eat them and their neighbors. If there’s one performance in the film that truly works, it’s hers.
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Ewan McGregor feels slightly out of place as Greg, the ever-optimistic dad who’s sort of bumbling but carries much of the film’s heart. The dynamic of the Platt family doesn’t need to be terribly interesting because it’s wrapped around one of the most interesting plot devices you can have: dinosaurs. The most thrilling aspect of this premise is that Mitchell isn’t scared to go full dinosaur. From fully feathered raptors to massively lifelike stegosauruses, the creatures are scary and intense in their physical presence.
Most of my fellow moviegoers spent the time after the film talking about its mechanics. I think that’s a bit of a pitfall because Mitchell isn’t trying to solidify the world in which this takes place. Mitchell properly understands that Spielberg’s films worked because you didn’t have to put all that thought into them. In a similar way to Christopher Nolan, I think that they can be the dumb people’s ideas of smart movies.
Of course, The End of Oak Street doesn’t purport to be anything smarter than what it is, but it simply says that there are dinosaurs and they come because the town was transported in a portal. That’s interesting enough for most people. Because of all this, Mitchell effectively creates a film that is as heavy on its substance as it has to be. The trade-off for this is that it does make the family element weaker, and it does make the performances weaker for it.
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Stella, in particular, who I find to be such an incredible actor, is not particularly great here. Neither is Convery. Both of them play very normal, typical children, but I think we do live in a film society now, where young actors are expected to be so strong. It’s a shame when their characters are so thin they have nothing to do. They are dressed in very boring fashion and are simply there to scream and do sort of stupid things.
A still from The End of Oak Street. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
A still from The End of Oak Street. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
A still from The End of Oak Street. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
The writing makes the film feel a little cheaper than it is, but for everything Mitchell loses in his script, he makes up for it in his direction. It’s nicely shot by Michael Gioulakis and beautifully scored by Michael Giacchino. In all the technical areas where it counts, The End of Oak Street is truly magnificent! It’s funny, on a big scale, and kind of weird.
Is The End of Oak Street worth watching?
David Robert Mitchell feels so focused on what he’s trying to do that he just hopes that the audience will understand it, and I appreciated that so much. While it gets lost in a lot of the homage that’s trying to portray, The End of Oak Street is the best Steven Spielberg movie in years, without even being directed by him. It’s funny, scary, and intense, heartwarming and exciting. This is certainly a lot more shallow than Mitchell’s previously directed and written works, but a film so enjoyable with a family or on a warm summer night that it will age far better than it will be critiqued.
The End of Oak Street releases in theaters on August 14.
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