'The End of Oak Street' Deserves to Bomb
Or, the continued emasculation of Ewan McGregor
There’s a scene around the middle mark of Jurassic World (2015) where one of the two main kids, Gray (Ty Simpkins) randomly says to his brother:
GRAY: “If Mom and Dad get divorced, will one of us be with Mom and the other with Dad?”
The older brother, Zach (Nick Robinson) is skeptical, stating that his younger brother “hasn’t been around long enough” until Gray replies: “They get mail from two different lawyers”.
ZACH: “That doesn’t mean anything”
GRAY: “I Googled them. They’re divorce lawyers.”
This is never addressed in the film again.
(One comment on Reddit stated the reason the scene was included was so “all the kids in the audience with divorced parents are reminded that they could get double the movie merchandise.”)
But seriously, why include this scene?
Because, dear reader, adding a random divorce subplot is thought by many Hollywood writers to be the key to making a movie SPIELBERGIAN.
And boy, does The End of Oak Street want to be SPIELBERGIAN.
(Mild spoilers from here on out)
I will grant this movie that it at least has the courage to follow through on its commitment to a shoed-in divorce subplot.
The End of Oak Street follows Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as hapless parents in the suburbs who are struggling to make ends meet for their two kids. One is a frustrated writer who secretly wishes for the career they never got to have and the other is a slightly stupid but loving parent and spouse who just wants to keep the family together.
It’s really funny because if this had come out in the 1980s when this takes place, Ewan would be playing the frustrated writer and Hathaway the loveable, hapless mother.
But because this movie thinks we are still in “Woke 1”, of course it is the opposite. Hathaway is the one who shoots dinosaurs with a shotgun, and McGregor is forced, Walter White style, to run around humiliated in his tightie-whities.
Because, as John Lennon sand in his all-too prescient “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:
Happy ever after in the marketplace
Molly lets the children lend a hand
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face
And in the evening she's a singer with the band, yeah
I do need to backtrack a bit here: there are dinosaurs in this movie. I won’t exactly reveal how, because that is part of the fun, Twilight Zone nature of this film which I do appreciate. And not an ultra-serious, “save the poor dinosaurs” tone of the recent Jurassic movies, but a bona-fide Flintstones vibe complete with a smoking volcano looming in the background.
Ironically, in an age where movies tend to stick the first and third act more than they do the slogging second, the second act is where this movie shines, particularly due to the fact that it features a healthy amount of really well-done dinosaur action to balance out whatever writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) is trying to do with these characters.
And I should note, there is a touching personal element Mitchell brings to this that I won’t spoil that’s revealed at the end of the film, which makes the whole thing semi-autobiographical. But it ends up feeling half-baked, and ends up coming off as really poor feminist messaging even if that was not the director’s intention. (I should also note there’s probably one of the most forced “this character is actually gay” scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. And I’ve seen The Rise of Skywalker!).
Jurassic Park expertly weaves its family drama subtly, with Dr. Grant going on an arc of learning what it means to be a father. It’s all portrayed in subtext, imagery, and clever dialogue (“Life finds a way”). You get so wrapped up in the plot (introducing the world and mechanics of Jurassic Park which set up the later action sequences) that you don’t even notice the story. That’s masterful storytelling.
I will say, this film does have one of the boldest, wack-o endings I’ve seen in a recent film so I will have to give it props. And the longer you think about it, the darker it gets.
But the whole thing just loses any credibility when it tries to make you care about the family. If this film had been directed by someone like Tim Burton1 or Sam Raimi in the late 80s/early 90s, the family would be hilariously, satirically unlikeable to begin with and the camp would be dialed to 11. It would’ve starred Bruce Campbell and Susan Sarandon as the parents and Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp as the kids, and the neighbor would have been Danny DeVito with wild hair and fifteen cats. The whole town would have memorable characters, some of whom you probably aren’t too sad to see get eaten.
But because we as a society have decidedly become allergic to camp, even silly movies like this one need “an emotional core”.
You made a movie about dinosaurs magically appearing in the suburbs! Have fun with it!
And if you think it’s cooler to emulate Spielberg by adding divorce subplots, remember that you’re trying to emulate ta guy who remembered not to take himself too seriously with his dinosaur movies.2
(It’s insane how good this scene looks for 1997!)
When I wrote this I knew that Tim Burton had been on the shortlist to direct Jurassic Park, but a quick Google has informed me that before he made Mars Attacks! he was going to make Dinosaurs Attack!, but then Jurassic Park came out and he decided to pivot. Now I’m really sad.
Yes, technically Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) being divorced is technically part of the plot of The Lost World, a film which actually has a lot of similar problems to The End of Oak Street.