How ‘The End of Oak Street’ Imbued Itself with Accidental Meaning: A Critical Review

‘The End of Oak Street’ was the official surprise of the summer.

What looked like an unfocused, mess of a movie that seemed to only offer meaningless dinosaur spectacle in the way even the recent Jurassic movies hadn’t quite fallen to, surpassed expectations by a wide margin and became what was one of the summer’s best films.

David Robert Mitchell returned to the silver screen in force, delivering a trojan horse of a film that used its blockbuster spectacle to explore the hidden uneasiness and tension that was embedded in 80s suburbia. The dinosaurs may be the marketing hook here, but in the film they’re merely a vehicle to transport these characters on a necessary journey of self-discovery, understanding, and forgiveness.

Many wondered why the Amblin-esque 1980s setting was necessary for any other reasons besides nostalgia and maybe even aesthetic pleasure, but viewers paying close enough attention realize why this type of story chose a specific time period to present it’s timeless themes. Ideas, struggles, and motivations in the film are increasingly normalized and public today; but over forty years ago, many suffered in isolated silence, worried about the taboo nature of their strife. The nuclear family has been criticized and analyzed constantly in modern-day, but in the 80s, it was seen as this unwavering, perfect ideal. Any problem brewing under the surface was ignored.

Yet, it’s the silencing of those problems that cause them to grow into larger problems; people become unheard, unseen. Resentment builds. Denise, played by Anne Hathaway, wonders if the family life is all she’s meant for; she yearns for an escape where her imagination might reign supreme, where artistic expression is the guiding light of her life. She has to hide this part of herself — not even the worrisome thoughts of leaving, but her creative side entirely. She spends her nights alone in the basement, typing away with headphones on. It becomes such an important part of her life that both she and the viewers are devastated when they find out all her hard work as been washed away with the basement flood, yet those closest to her have no understanding or knowledge of that tragedy at all. She feels like she has to hide this part of herself in basements and quiet meetings, festering a resentment towards those she feels she has a duty not to tell that begins to blind her to the love she holds for them.

Greg, played by Ewan McGregor, is endlessly optimistic. Practically to a fault, even. He wants to believe that everything will turn out okay because the other possibility is one he can’t even bear. Greg, despite his good intentions, is a manifestation of this ‘ignorance is bliss’ world that literally comes back to bite him. But this isn’t a practice that transforms Greg into an antagonist; instead, the film rightfully treats him as a tragic character. It’s the one who, no matter what has happened, no matter how low things get, strives to see the silver lining. And of course, it’s him who suffers the worst fate. Greg doesn’t want to hide the negatives — he knows they’re there, but chooses to see the positive. It’s a tragic type of naive nobility that thrusts what could’ve been such a simple character into a realm of multi-dimension.

Greg also knows a thing or two about the burden of silent problems as well. He hides the fact that he was laid off from his job because he believes it’s his duty to do so — he’s the provider of the family, and he needs to ignore the severity of the problem and do something about it, no matter the personal cost. He struggles with judgment and anger from those around him for his sacrifices, all because he doesn’t realize that if he had voiced his struggles earlier, the subsequent tensions might’ve been replaced with support. It’s the 1980s patriarchal identity that Greg holds so importantly to his own self-actualization that becomes the problem here, which acts as a nice contrast to his other laid-back personality traits.

It’s these secrets, ones that the characters feel they have to hide, that grow and fester and mutate into monsters, threatening to swallow the family whole. There’s a reason why, despite the children’s own struggles with identity, we are constantly shown their reactions to the spousal arguments littered throughout the film. One particular argument reveals that one character knew another’s secrets the whole time, and has been silently working to prevent the discretion of their family that seems like it might happen any moment now.

And there’s dinosaurs. But really, what are those dinosaurs? They suddenly overwhelm the neighborhood, after clues and hints that something dark might be festering throughout the neighborhood, until the issue becomes too big to contain and it runs rampant, destroying Oak Street. The dinosaurs aren’t just dinosaurs, they’re marital problems, desires kept secret, acting out when you aren’t sure how to process what you were told shouldn’t be possible or happening. The dinosaurs are a manifestation of the problems suburban residents try to bury to deny their existence, letting them grow and grow until they become a giant threat that might very well be impossible to survive through.

And one could bet that wasn’t even the concrete intention when writing the script. Because the dinosaurs were always just dinosaurs, but because of the character work that Mitchell focuses so intently on, he unintentionally imbues every aspect of the film with a connective tissue that ties back to it’s overall setting. It’s the subconscious at work, both through the hands of the writer and the viewer. When given enough ideas to chew on, ideas that are developed and neatly contrasted with others, many can make easy connections that might’ve not even been there in the first place.

And maybe they were! It would be another testament to the writing at how layered yet subtle the metaphor is, especially in a movie about rampaging prehistoric monsters. But clearly, Mitchell was just as interested to play with the idea of a subverted Amblin cast and neighborhood as he was with the dinosaurs he places in it. There’s a reason that, despite the obvious Spielbergian inspirations, the film finds itself becomes increasingly and increasingly gnarly at every turn; Mitchell cleverly plays the long game with regards to atmosphere to reveal to the audience how one might feel if trapped inside a time and neighborhood such as this for years on end.

‘The End of Oak Street’ doesn’t just want it’s audience to watch what plays out on screen, it wants them to think about it — to be transported to another time just as the characters were, and wonder how they might survive and live in an alternate yet very real reality. It wants its audience to ask themselves how our setting might impact and shape our identity, and how different aspects of said identity might resist that change, exploring the grey space in-between.

To ‘The End of Oak Street,’ setting is everything — and why wouldn’t it be? It takes place in two separate time periods in the past, and through its abstract contrast, asks: “has anything really changed?”