I have been anticipating Olivia Wilde’s new movie, because… Florence Pugh… but also because Booksmart is hilarious, a fantastically fun debut. But by golly, there’s been some controversy surrounding this movie, which has been hard to avoid. I’ve even heard mention of Wilde sighting Dr. Jordan Peterson as inspiration for this movie’s villain, although I haven’t looked into it myself 😬 Okay, now I’m scared, and not just for this thriller’s eerie content.
Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the town of Victory, with parties and booze, and traditional gender roles which see the women stay home all day, while the men go off to work at an undisclosed facility. All seems well, until Alice’s neighbour spaces, trying to warn her fellow socialites that all is not what it seems, and that the town’s founder and sole employer Frank (Chris Pine) is not to be trusted. Alice begins to ask questions of her own and doesn’t receive much information in return. She searches beyond the agreed confines of their small idyllic community, and her mind begins to warp as well.
Okay, the comparison to Dr. Jordan Peterson is absurd – it’s well documented by now, and I don’t really need to get into it. All I will say is that when Frank speaks he never says anything of substance, where I always seem to understand what Peterson is saying. That’s not to say there isn’t culty charlatans on the internet out there, who spread misogynistic gibberish, but to evoke Peterson as a purveyor is wrong – Wilde hits the wrong target, much like this movie. A simple mistake? Maybe. But with Peterson in mind, for a while I considered the misguided message of this movie to be that dumb people should not get sucked in by wisdom 😬 but it takes smarts to decipher what’s actually being said in any given situation and figure out what to digest.
I was really restless during this movie. I still have to figure out if the vacuous depictions of these townspeople’s lifestyles, and the constant soundtrack that accompanies the opening act, is deliberate to disorient me, or if in the quest to portray superficiality, the movie is superficial itself. Even if I give Don’t Worry Darling the benefit of the doubt, I still couldn’t connect with any of these blissfully conceited characters, and that provides an empathy problem, especially when I’m supposed to care about what happens to Alice. And I’m thinking on characters like Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games who don’t have to change themselves to clash with the smothering social structure around them, and I think I might’ve cared for Alice if we’d been shown that she just hadn’t given any thought to her husband’s work, or the place they live, because she’s been so happily content before now – we might see that she’s always had the guile to figure out what’s really happening, but never seen a reason to put it to use. But we pop into the story where Bunny (Olivia Wilde) has already decided to kick neighbour Margaret (Kiki Layne) out of the friend’s circle, and we have to assume that Alice has accepted it too; rude. I really needed some extra context in Don’t Worry Darling’s first act, to root myself in the story. And I know the point of the movie is to not know what’s going on until later, but even still. I’m deciding more and more that I don’t like these movies that kick the can of logic down the road, and require you to trust the filmmaker will produce an exciting payoff – also known as, J.J. Abrams and his ‘unopened mystery box’ theory. But in movies like Shutter Island and The Lost Daughter you care about what’s going on, and the characters, before the bigger picture is revealed; I just didn’t here. Once we find out that, okay, Alice is a doctor, and Jack is a schlub, things start falling into place, but that doesn’t mean the first two acts weren’t a chore.
The sound design is phenomenal; very creepy. The set design is pretty good too, and Florence Pugh’s performance is solid. Yet Don’t Worry Darling’s plot and imagery borrows so heavily from Suspiria from just a few years ago (and other movies like The Truman Show), that it almost begs a viewer hasn’t seen Luca Guadagnino’s remake of 2018 to engage with this one. And more so, I can nitpick this movie’s plot to the hilt. For example, the inciting incident is so stupid, the thing that gets Alice to rebel – there’s a plane crash so she’s going to climb the mountains to see if they need help. Call somebody! An ambulance, a professional of some sort. At the dining table scene, Frank is excited to see Alice as a challenge to his company, but she’s really done nothing for us or him to rally behind other than chance a useless medical file, go for a desert stroll, and watch a neighbour cut herself. Alice exclaims to Wilde’s character that “they’re lying to us!” but, well, no, they’re not telling you anything – there’s a difference. She suddenly questions Jack’s job description as an… ‘engineer of progressive materials’ (?) when that’s always been a bullshit sentence, and it begs the question how anyone has been so silly to believe in it in the first place. But I get it; somehow neighbour Margaret has triggered Alice’s subconscious, creating nagging visions and the need to escape. So how did Margaret break the programming? Her mind seems to be the real hero of this story, but it’s never properly explained.
Thematically, Don’t Worry Darling feels like a jab at the 1950s, and well skewered, but I don’t know how many people are out there screaming that the 1950s were perfect. Are there? I don’t think anybody noteworthy is against women surgeons either. I’m glad this movie eventually questions Alice for enjoying the very elegant lifestyle, with plenty of day drinks and a powerful infatuation shared in by her husband, for the majority of the movie – all these ladies have to do in return is clean a bathtub, cook tea, and wash a window every now and then; sounds pretty good to me. The problem I’m trying to get it is that this place seems pretty perfect, for people who want to be there. Jack and Bunny want to be there, and so the sinisterism only comes into the story by the company allowing applicants to bring their loved ones in without consent – that’s fucked up. It’s a virtual reality con, that this movie stretches to tie in with female oppression and oppose archaic values 😐 I wonder if the movie would’ve been stronger from Jack’s perspective… Because Don’t Worry Darling challenges a male fantasy for males, but from a female perspective – and I think it’s fair to assume there’s bound to be some essence lost in translation. Near the end, Jack remarks how he’s in agony working in the real world to maintain the money for this fantasy, and his wife is miserable with unfulfilled dreams, so if the goal was to convince men that traditional roles aren’t perfect like they may think, then explore a story that has them living it out, and provide the error to their folly.
YouTube sensation Chris Stuckmann did a review recently on Martyrs where he amazed at the level of nihilism he imagined a director would have to maintain to produce such a movie, and that’s about how I feel about this movie’s hostility. Don’t Worry Darling is not like Men or Promising Young Woman which take their shots, but are measured in the result. Don’t Worry Darling feels emotional without enough consideration. But hey, if that’s how you really feel Olivia Wilde, express yourself; that’s your prerogative. Look, I binge-watched House a few years ago, and Olivia Wilde was constantly sexualized on that show week-to-week, as was commonplace with many free-to-air TV shows of that era before HBO and streaming embraced sexual content, and kicked the door in – so I could understand if she is tracing back through her own experiences and is pissed. But it doesn’t discount the fact that this movie is mean-spirited. It’s anti-men, and not necessarily on target. And as a man, the question is not really whether I like this movie, but more if I value its position or respect it, and I don’t think I do. I might watch this movie again in a few years’ time, and change my evaluation through nostalgia or a changing social landscape, but art is supposed to evoke emotion, and all I can offer is my abrasive take right now in the current light of day…
2.5
P.S. Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde don’t do much for me, although their characters are pretty one-dimensional, so it’s not a comment on their acting. I don’t know why Wilde wanted to put herself in this movie; we’ve seen Shyamalan do it for years, often picking the most streetwise characters like Wilde does here, and it always seems on the nose. It’s not a choice I would make.
Leave a Reply