I’d never thought of this until celebrity gossip Maureen Callahan pointed it out, but Anne Hathaway is one of the actresses most protective of her career, aiming for roles that won’t harm her image. She could probably afford some dings since she’s so divine: I could watch this brunette goddess and her oversized deep brown eyes if all she was doing was eating a sandwich.
This year, she’s in five movies. So far: there’s the sequel to her 2006 success The Devil Wears Prada; then she played Penelope, Queen of Ithaka in The Odyssey (her third Christopher Nolan film); before that she was a rock star in an A24 product I don’t think many saw, Mother Mary: and this fall she will appear as a spooky, bedridden writer in Verity (which can’t help but make one think of Misery). This month she stars in a Syfy romcom, The End of Oak Street.
Critics have pointed out that Hollywood may be imploding financially in part because so much of its product is sequels or film adaptations of TV shows, video games and even board games. Oak Street continues Hollywood’s fascination with the do-overs provided by multiverses and time travel, used repeatedly in the Star Trek and Marvel franchises, and currently the premise of HBO’s very good Big Bang Theory spin off, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.
Just as HBO’s Stuart is a remake of the late-1990s Jerry O’Connell TV show Sliders (itself a twist on Quantum Leap), Oak Street is reminiscent of Jurassic Park. I think several films and shows with similar story lines all come out at the same time because the people doing e.g. The Munsters or Bewitched and the crew behind The Addams Family or I Dream of Jeannie attend the same parties or are sleeping with each other, and copy ideas.
Earlier this year conservative movie critics like Peachy Keenan praised Ryan Gosling’s Syfy adventure Project Hail Mary as wholesome and uplifting. They were right, and the same can be said for Oak Street, which is so family-oriented—a suburban married couple, from the same time and milieu as the kids and family in Stranger Things, try to stick together and survive when a two-mile radius of their neighborhood is transported, in what they take to be a violent lightning storm, to a time full of dinosaurs. Spoilers for the ultraconservatives: at one point after they’ve survived being chased by velociraptors, Hathaway makes husband Ewan McGregor pose in the yard in front of two herbivorous, emergent mammals (hairy dino giraffes) screwing while stretched over a detached garage, while she takes a Polaroid; at another point Hathaway’s slightly chunky teen daughter is having a mutual sapphic crush on a neighbor girl she’s rescued and is cleaning and bandaging, the new neighbor girl her little brother was dreaming about.
Oak Street uses its time travel deus ex machina for a plot twist not used a lot in the multi-verse/time travel scripts: you get to see your loved one die, sacrificing themselves to save you, and also get to rearrange events so they stay alive and live with them knowing how much they love you. It makes marital and parent-child relationships better.
Worth at least a matinee ticket. Most children won’t get the teen lesbian attraction, and as to the lizards in love, you’ll have to explain that as soon as the kids see the pets or livestock doing it anyway.