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Major spoilers for The End of Oak Street below. Beware!
More from Hung Up this week: ‘Am Missing You. How to Fix?’: Six months without Auntie … Two essays from honorable mentions of the Lena Dunham x Girls Write Now essay contest I helped judge … ‘Spare’ Some Change (Meghan and Harry head back to London)
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The End of Oak Street is exactly the type of peak-summer August movie that feels good to slip into a big air-conditioned room to see. The problems are simple enough to frame what’s essentially a goofy monster movie: Dad (Ewan McGregor) never wants to acknowledge any problems, like his unemployment or his drinking. Mom (Anne Hathaway) is bright and ambitious and wants a bigger life than the one she’s living in the suburbs. Two kids and a mortgage into their life together, both feel their paths diverging. (For what it’s worth, The Invite had basically the same marriage problems and, for some reason, had to put Penelope Cruz in a terrible wig to solve them.¹)
We know the dinosaurs will eventually show up to put this domestic disaster into perspective, but the movie slow-rolls the reveal. There’s a persnickety neighbor! There’s an outdoor dog! There’s a new girl in town, and she goes to private school! The family daughter can’t afford to go to Cornell!² Anne Hathaway wears wired headphones to bang away at the novel she’s secretly writing in the basement, a tome where she fantasizes about leaving her family behind. Ewan McGregor wears shorts that are just a little shorter than you’d expect because it’s the 80s!...
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