I went to “The End of Oak Street” with a mix of hopeful trepidation. I love all the Jurassic Park movies, but the longer they go on, the less of a thrill they become, even as each iteration seems to increase the peril and world-ending stakes. The trailers made “Oak Street” to be a cheap “Jurassic Park” ripoff, and it easily could have been except for the exceptional performances of Anne Hathaway (“The Odyssey”), Ewan McGregor (“Star Wars”), and Maisy Stella (“Nashville” TV show) and Christian Convery (“Frankenstein”) as their teen children.
If you’ve seen even one trailer, you know the entire premise: Oak Street and the surrounding neighborhood blocks are suddenly transported back in time a few hundred million years. The “how” and “why” of such an incident are barely given a dozen lines of explanatory dialog, but it really doesn’t matter. We’re there to see people running from, shooting, and being eaten by dinosaurs, and “The End of Oak Street” delivers on all fronts.
Surprisingly, however, the characters are better developed than I expected. All four main characters have distinct personalities, fears and desires, and believable motivations for their every action, and those are well explored long before the dinosaurs appear. Even a couple neighbors are given enough personality that I truly cared whether they lived or died.
This film really shines, however, around Anne Hathaway’s performance as the family’s wife/mother. As good as she was in “The Odyssey,” this film gives her a LOT more to do, and she delivers on all fronts. If anything, “Oak Street” does a better job illustrating why she’s an Academy Award-winning actor than all three hours of her performance in “The Odyssey.”
“The End of Oak Street” revolves around Anne Hathaway’s character: she loves her husband, but she’s unhappy in her marriage; she loves her family and life, but she yearns for more personal fulfillment; and though she has all the material possessions she could need – the house, the car, etc. – she’s still lacking an emotional partnership with her husband who hides things from her and makes unilateral decisions that exclude her from the process. Her only true, spiritual and emotional outlet is a novel she’s writing that’s as much memoir as fantasy. Into this mix drops a whole neighborhood full of dinosaurs, and she must navigate it all, allowing us to experience with her every positive and negative – and there are a lot of each.
Regarding Bechdels, this film passes: 1) There are several named, women characters; 2) they speak with each other several times; 3) and when they do, they almost never speak about the male lead.
In fact, this film does so well giving women more to do, including both screen time and active, plot-driven moments – not just sitting around waiting for a man to return, as Penelope does in “The Odyssey” – that the Washington Examiner dubbed it one of the most woke films of the decade that somehow manages to both ruin nostalgia for while also desecrating the 1980s, all because…she drives the car and wields a shotgun.
You know it’s a good movie when it can accomplish all that!